


The Lost Years

by undersail2013



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Apple Pie Life, Bi!Dean, Canon Compliant, Dean Loves Pie, Demon Deals, Homophobia, Homophobic John, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Pre-Series, Research, Retcon, Sad Ending, Sex in the Impala, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans Character, Underage - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-12
Updated: 2014-03-14
Packaged: 2018-01-04 10:12:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 26,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1079748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/undersail2013/pseuds/undersail2013
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His number will be up soon enough, he figures; may as well bang a few gongs before the lights go out.  He grabs an ID.  Steve McQueen.  <i>Heh, my favorite, this could be a good omen.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First Night

The first night is rough. 

He’s abandoned, heartbroken and angry and vengeful all at once. He’s driving too fast with tears in his eyes. First bar he comes to, he swings the Impala into the parking lot and stops her with the motherfucking parking brake. He pounds on the steering wheel for a good five minutes before scrubbing his face dry against his sleeve. 

He opens the glove box and takes a long hard look inside. It’s right there, daring him. _Pick me up,_ it whispers. _I’ll be quick,_ it purrs. _No one will give a good goddamn anyways,_ it taunts. 

How would they ever know? Fucking Sammy at fucking Stanford. Fucking Dad wherever the fuck he disappears to, and it ain’t for a hunt. How would they ever fucking know if he blew his fucking brains out right here in some bumfuck parking lot in the middle of fucking nowhere? Some poor fucker would find him in the morning, call the police. They’d find twenty different IDs and a trunk full of guns and hoodoo, and they’d figure that the world was a little safer because this psycho offed himself. Dean grins darkly. _Good, one less killer on the streets,_ he thinks, _one less monster._

But he doesn’t move. His fingers weave together neatly in his lap as he watches the handgun, waits for it to close the distance. But it doesn’t move.

Somehow he wrenches his eyes away, glances in the rearview. He looks like shit, but well, he’s going in there to get shit-faced, so it’ll all balance out…

He leans across the bench seat and this time he shoves his hand into the glovebox. But not for the gun. No, not today. Probably not today. His number will be up soon enough, he figures; may as well bang a few gongs before the lights go out. He grabs an ID. Steve McQueen. _Heh, my favorite, this could be a good omen._ He pockets a wad of cash while he’s at it and slides out the car. 

“Fuck Dad, fuck Sammy,” he mutters, striding across the parking lot. “Who cares, right? I mean, so what if they want to live their own lives. Without me. Right? They’re grown-ups, they don’t need my sorry ass to watch over them.” _Fuck._

He’s so intent on his anger that he almost barrels into a drunk guy and girl, wrapped up tight in one another and stumbling towards an old Chevy with too many miles on it. Not that they notice him. _The invisible man. I don’t exist._ He squeezes the fake ID in his hand as if to prove it. 

He jerks the door open. Well damn, this is not what he expected to find in a shitty, beat-down bar on a shitty, beat-down stretch of asphalt. Only it’s more nightclub than bar, hot chicks in skimpy outfits serving overpriced drinks to pretty people. _I’m under-fucking-dressed. And I look like shit._ He bails into the bathroom, splashes a bit of cold water on his face. As the redness and puffiness subsides, maybe he grins at the mirror, thinking this crowd will be easy pickings.

Settled at the bar with a scotch in one hand and a menthol in the other, he decides that this crowd will not be easy pickings after all. The girls shy away from the roughneck, pressing closer to their fratboy dates. Where the hell did all these coeds even come from? There’s nothing for miles. But maybe that’s the point: trek to a pretend honky-tonk in the middle of nowhere, without actually giving up any creature comforts. Kids these days are weird.

So no coeds for old Dean. The brunette bartender’s shutting him down left, right, and center, but the blond one keeps his glass full and lets him jabber. 

“First time here?”

“Yeah, just in from out of town. A friend suggested this place.”

“Huh. Looking to pick someone up.”

“You know it!” He shoots the rest of his scotch and motions for more. “But I don’t know about this. These kids, they seem so-”

“Normal?” Dean nods around his glass. “Yeah, I can see that. But the one at the end of the bar looks promising.”

“Where?”

“Red ballcap, navy suit jacket.”

Dean sneers benignly, stamps his cigarette out into the ashtray. “Kinda skinny, dontcha think?”

“Cute though.” 

Dean’s eyes snap to the bartender’s face, trying to decide if he meant it, or- _What kind of place is this, anyway?_ “Yeah,” he says slowly. “I guess he is.” He turns back to Red Cap and catches himself pulling his come-hither look, eyebrow up, a slight tilt of the chin, and wearing a smirk. _Cool your jets, tiger._ No, fuck that. He’s here to rebel against the bastards who left him. He’s here to drink and get drunk. He’s here to fuck and be fucked.

Vengeance is sucking a dick in the parking lot.

 _Bring it, pretty boy,_ he challenges as the boy approaches. “Hey. Buy me a drink?”

Red Cap’s eyes widen but he doesn’t duck his head or show any embarrassment. Just stares steadfastly at Dean. “Uh yeah.” He gulps, looks around for the bartender, gives a point in the vicinity of Dean’s glass. “I’ve, uh, never seen you here before.” 

“I was thinking the same thing,” Dean bluffs. “Cheers,” and clinks his newly-filled glass against Red Cap’s beer bottle. Sam Adams. Good stuff. “You got a name?”

“Um, Steve,” but it’s a lie. Weird.

“That’s funny, me too,” Dean winks. “Least, that’s what my fake ID says,” whispered conspiratorially, leaning close to the other boy’s ear. 

This close up, Dean can hear a slight chuckle answering his confession. “You don’t need a fake ID.”

“Don’t I?” Out of the corner of his eye, he can see “Steve” fingering the shaft of his beer. Yes, very promising. 

“How old are you,” the other guy returns cautiously.

“22. Why, how old are you?”

“Old enough,” he snaps.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He feigns nonchalance. “Only I don’t want to go to jail for the things I’m gonna do to you.” He smirks to watch the boy shudder, in a good way. Finishing his drink, he reaches for Red Cap’s beer bottle. Brings it to his mouth; with a little lick, he wraps his lips around the opening, chugs it. Smiles charmingly. “Hey, uh, you wanna get out of here?”

The other boy nods dumbly. He throws a crumpled fifty on the bar and half-drags Dean outside without stopping for change. Or indeed checking that it suffices to cover the tab (it does).

Dean never stops smiling all the way outside, into the cool night air, still slightly damp from the evening’s rainstorms. It is a smile to hide his fear. _What am I doing?_ he wonders as Steve shoves him against the wall of the joint and presses their lips together. Too urgently. “Shhh,” Dean soothes, drawing Red Cap into his arms and kissing him languidly. “No rush. You got me all night.”

Round about the time the other Steve starts biting Dean’s collarbone and rutting into his thigh, Dean grabs him by the wrist and leads him to the Impala. He clambers through the driver’s side door, butt first, and pulls the other boy in after him. Over him. Pushes the jacket off his shoulders, sets drunk fingers to work unfastening his jeans. _Goddamn button-fly, fuck this guy and his bad choices._ “Seriously, who wears button-fly jeans to get laid?” Realizes he’s said that out loud and laughs. 

“Sorry,” Steve mumbles, finishing the job himself while Dean opens his own pants. 

He strokes them together for a time until the other dude whines, “So good.”

“Let me blow you,” Dean whimpers.

The other boy can only nod as Dean flips them around to kneel on the floor boards. He’s only done this a few times, with Joanna, the one girlfriend who’d been a boy at her last school and didn’t mind trading blowjobs. He thinks he’s pretty good at it; Joanna had thought so, too. But it slowly dawns on Dean that this is Steve’s first time. He moans with genuine surprise at every new sensation and falls apart so quickly that Dean nearly gets a face full. The phrase “next time” dances through Dean’s head, and he blushes red hot at the thought. 

“Was that okay for you?” Dean asks, almost sheepishly.

Red Cap is slumped against the back of the bench. “Mm-hmm,” he mumbles. “Thank you. That was- Hmm.”

Dean climbs up to straddle his hips, claim another kiss. “Thank you. I needed that.” From this position, he can snatch the wool blanket off the backseat; he wraps it around his shoulders and lets it drape down around the both of them.

The other boy wraps his arms sleepily around Dean’s white butt, holds him tight. “Don’t go yet.”

“I won’t,” Dean laughs softly and presses delicate kisses into Steve’s short stiff hair, down to his neck, nips at his collarbone, down a long thin arm, tastes the paler skin of his palm, trails his tongue along his index finger. “S’my car.”

“I knew that,” then gasps, suddenly awake, as Dean sucks a long, skinny finger into his mouth and worries it with teeth and tongue.

“Oh Steve.” 

Dean smirks and repeats the sentiment. 

“Ty.”

“Ty?”

“It’s not really Steve. My real name is Ty.”

“Nice to meet you, Ty,” returning his mouth to Ty’s lips and murmuring against the soft skin there, “I’m Dean.”

“You lied about your name?”

“You started it.”

They kiss and touch and growl their way through round two and promptly fall asleep, curled together under a blue blanket on the front seat of the Impala.

 

~~~

 

Ty nudges Dean and whispers, “I should go.”

“Don’t go.”

“Dean, I- It’s light out. I should go.”

Dean sits up, ruffles his crazy bedhead into stranger permutations. “S’morning already?”

“Dean,” Ty begins. “I really don’t know how to thank you.”

“Ty, you don’t have to-“ Dean becomes aware that Ty is holding something out to him. The ugly realization breaks through the sleep and activates the anger mechanisms in his brain. “Dude, what the fuck?”

Ty chickens out, tries to withdraw his hand, but Dean grips his wrist tight. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” He plucks the folded bill from Ty’s fingers and throws it back at him. “Get your fucking money out of my face, before I beat your ass six ways to Sunday.”

“Um, I thought, ow! Oh shit, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, shitshitshit, I’m sorry!”

“Spit it out.”

“The Love Shack. That’s what this place is. It’s, um, a place to go to pick people up. For um, sex. For, like, money.”

Dean sucks in a breath and his eyes narrow. “I am not your whore.”

“I know, I mean, I know that, now, and I- oh shit, please don’t kick my ass, I’m so sorry!” 

Dean considers the frightened figure before him. “I won’t kick your ass. Get out.”

“Dean, please, I’m sorry, I really like you! Please don’t kick me out, let me make it up to you.”

“I don’t think you can.” He says nothing further, but makes no further efforts to remove Ty from his presence. In fact, he almost seems to be holding him close deliberately- his fingers still grasp Ty’s thin wrist. 

“Dean, I’m so, so sorry. It was my first time at the Shack and I didn’t know the rules, but you looked, I don’t know, receptive. Safe.” 

“Buddy, I am anything but safe.”

“I took a chance, and I’m sorry.” As the silence that follows lengthens into awkwardness, he lays a brown hand on Dean’s tanned cheek. Seeks his eyes. “I didn’t know why else a beautiful man like you would want me.”

Dean melts. “You’re a terrible liar,” he lies. 

“Can I kiss you?”

Dean nods and sighs to feel Ty’s warm lips on his. He parts his own lips and lets himself sink deeper under Ty’s caresses. 

When they pull apart, Dean murmurs. “I’m sorry. The place was weird, I should have known something was up.” He opens his eyes. “I’m glad I met you, though.” A glint of sunlight catches his eye and he glances around, somewhat disoriented. “We should go.” 

“Yeah. Here’s your shirt.”

“And I think your coat’s on the backseat.” Dean is buttoning Ty back into his wrinkly dress shirt when he asks, “So where to, Ty? Can I drive you home?”

Ty makes a bitter sound. “No, I don’t know where I’m going. Long story.”

“Yeah, join the club.”


	2. Wrong Answers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s something of a comfort, actually. Like maybe his life hasn’t been a string of crappy rooms, ugly square beads on a ribbon of asphalt stretching eighteen years into the past. _Nah._ Stability is for other people. Normal people. The people people like Dean save.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings for brief discussions of prior non-con, suicide attempt; underage; minor panic attack

_"They tell me I'm too young to understand / They say I'm caught up in a dream" - Avicii, "Wake Me Up"_

 

Dean’s staring down at his odometer, confused. 

“You okay?” Ty asks. He’s sitting very still in the shotgun seat, hands folded studiously. _Almost like he’s praying._ He’s very still.

“Yeah, I just can’t figure out how-” He glances over at Ty with that same look of puzzlement on his face. 

Ty’s eyes go wide when he realizes Dean’s watching him. “What?”

“This is not possible,” he replies, swinging his eyes back to the road. “That last sign said we’re on 89 towards Provo. But that’s not possible. I was in fucking Denver last night. Not to mention the sun’s in the wrong place,” he mutters. He turns again to Ty. “Where the hell are we?”

“Outside Spanish Fork, south of Provo. Out in the boondocks.”

“Huh.” Dean says nothing further, says nothing about the five hundred miles his car did not drive yesterday. He’s inclined to believe that he misremembered the number of miles on the Impala when they left Denver. He’s inclined to believe that he forgot the correct number in the stress of losing Sammy and the panic attack that threw him into a tailspin, landing him in Ty’s lap. He’s inclined to explain it away.

Except that’s not the sort of thing Dean forgets.

He knows how many miles she had the day he faced his first werewolf (19,670, not long after the fourth rollover). He knows how many miles she had the night he and Rhonda snuck into the drive-through and missed the whole movie (99,979). He can sure as hell remember how many miles were on the odometer last fucking night, and it’s short by about five hundred miles. 

Immediately, he assumes that Ty is not who he says he is. _No problem. Smile, play nice, find the angle._ If he can move the car, Dean reasons, he’s strong or powerful or both. _Don’t piss it off, Dean,_ he can hear Bobby saying, _not ’til you know what it’ll do to you._ If he’d thought to bring his machete into the cab, he could’ve- no, the angle’s all wrong. _Shit._ Dean decides to watch him like a hawk and hope that whatever he is, he ain’t got a grudge against the IHOP. 

“So what were you doing there last night, anyway?”

“Long story.”

“Yeah, I get that.” Dean waits for an answer.

Ty sighs, knowing he’s not getting off the hook with a simple _Long story_. “Okay. A week ago, no wait, Thursday, so three nights ago, I, uh, I came out to my parents. It didn’t go well.”

Dean says nothing.

“They told me to leave, gave me ten minutes to pack my shit and get out.”

‘Harsh,” is the noncommittal reply. 

He laughs darkly and his usual youthful tenor drops an octave. ‘Yeah, ‘harsh.’ I left with a couple of changes of clothes and a toothbrush. Like, a toothbrush. Not even toothpaste, because I’m an idiot.” Dean can hear him choking up. Choking up is … human. “I was furious and heartbroken and I just felt betrayed.” He sniffs. “Mom drove me to the bus stop. She said, ‘You understand why you have to go?’ I asked her why, but of course I’m still crying my eyes out. ‘Because your brother, he won’t understand. He’ll think it’s okay.’ Well, that wasn’t gonna fly! I guess I opened the door, tried to jump out of the moving car. I heard her screaming ‘No!’ and then she grabbed my hand, and it must have been the thing that saved me. I hadn’t even thought; I just acted, and I’d be a smudge on the pavement, except my mom couldn’t let me kill myself. She could kick me out of the house so my baby brother didn’t catch the gay,” he scowls, “but she didn’t let me die.” He swipes at his eyes with his shirt sleeve. A short laugh escapes, and he tells Dean how his mom had given him a choice: the bus stop, or 36-hours in the psych ward.

_Never thought I’d be grateful that Dad was so lenient._ Not that John knew anything approximating the truth of his son’s heart. He saw no deeper than the tough hide of the hunter, and that was just how Dean liked it. “What the hell kinda choice is that?” 

“Exactly. I picked the bus stop, and she bought me a ticket for somewhere, fuck if I know. I gave it to some guy who looked homeless, and hopped in a truck with another guy. He, uh, he, well, I really did jump out of his truck, but it wasn’t going at the time.”

“He tried to touch you?” Dean’s surprised that he can be so furiously protective of Ty, considering he’s still not sure who or what he is. Though “normal kid” is starting to win out. “I hope you clobbered him.”

“Uh no, running was really my only option.”

Dean’s horrified, but then he catches a funny look on Ty’s face. 

“But. I stole his wallet!”

“Ha!” Dean crows. “Good for you, you sonofabitch. Anything good?”

Ty shrugs. “Meh. ID, a few credit cards, picture of his wife, probably,” he smirks again, “$800 in cash.”

“What?!”

He nods. “What’s a little emotional trauma? Worth every penny,” he rasps bitterly.

“Seriously, though? Did he-”

“Yeah, but, I don’t wanna talk about it.” He shudders, before tucking his hand into Dean’s. “It’s no big deal.”

Dean shakes his head but makes no move to free his hand. “You said I looked safe.”

“Mm-hmm,” Ty nods, avoiding eye contact.

“Were you looking to, uh, come to the dark side?”

“Yeah,” he mouths.

“Dude.”

“I was angry, I was vengeful, and I thought, ‘What better punishment for them kicking me out, if I immediately start fucking men?’” He shrugs. “I thought you could show me the ropes, help a fledgling brother-in-arms. So to speak. You looked, I don’t know, confident.”

Dean snorts. “I am so far from confident. I been abandoned, left for dead, by the only family I got, and I-” He stops. “But, uh, that’s another life.”

“I don’t know, it seems kinda fresh.” The hand in his tangles over and through and around his fingers, squeezes tight. 

He clears his throat. “Do people here not eat breakfast?”

“You’ve passed, like, three places. Another one coming up on the left-hand side.”

 

~~~

 

“I gotta ask, though,” Dean asks, around a mouthful of maple-soaked home fries, “how does a place like that even exist?”

“It’s Utah.”

Dean swallows, shoots Ty an exasperated look. “That’s supposed to explain it?”

Ty shrugs, cuts a forkful of waffle. “Repression, malcontent, I dunno, boredom. You lucked out; if you’d been looking for it, you’d never have found it.”

“Well, I think you just summed up my whole night.”

“Do you really have a fake ID?” Ty asks quietly.

“Dozens of ’em.”

“But why? It’s not like you can’t drink.”

Dean shakes his head. “Not for drinking. Dad would-“ He clears his throat. “I been doing that since my first, uh, since I was maybe fourteen.”

“Your dad let you drink?” he marvels, half-awed and half-horrified.

“Just beer and only after a, uh, rough job.”

“Doing what?”

Dean squirms. This has gotten real personal real fast, and he’s not accustomed to letting his guard down so quickly. Dean blames it on amber eyes in a mocha face. So he evades. “Itinerant work, you could say. We moved around a lot. Since my mom- since I was a kid, that black beauty out there,” nodding at the car, “has been home.”

“What kind of work?”

_Jesus Christ, he asks a lot of questions._ “Does it matter?”

“No. I just want to know about you.”

“Ha! No, you really don’t." Dean takes a swig of lukewarm coffee, grimaces. "Anyways, I don’t do that anymore. I’m out of the life, as of yesterday. My brother’s gone, my dad. Can’t very well hunt on my own,” and he regrets the words as soon as they leave his mouth. 

“You’re a hunter?”

“Of a sort.”

“Do you just travel around, season to season, following the game?” His waffle, half-eaten and forgotten, sogs in a puddle of apricot syrup.

“Um, yeah, kinda.”

“My dad took me on a hunting trip once when I was a kid. I pissed him off by scaring away all the birds, and he never took me again. What’s your favorite thing to hunt?”

“Werewolves.” _Shit fucking fuck, what the hell, Dean?_ “I mean, uh, wolves. Not for meat, of course, but uh, you gotta cull the packs.” 

“I thought it was deer that needed culling.”

“Right. But uh, you get too many wolves and you got bigger problems, you get me?”

Ty looks down at his waffle, contemplates finishing the mess. Instead, he spears a sausage off Dean’s plate.

“Hey, that was the last one!”

“Do you mind if I order more? This waffle is disgusting.”

“Dude, I don’t care what you order. You’re paying, Uncle Pennybags.”

Ty smirks. “You won’t think I’m trying to buy you?”

“Food’s different. I’ll whore it up for food,” Dean laughs. “You don’t want to know what I’ll do if you promise me a big greasy breakfast in the morning.”

“Oh I definitely want to know,” Ty teases.

Dean slides the check across the table with a wink. “I think we’re done here.” 

 

~~~

 

There’s always that one sketchy stain on the ceiling. Doesn’t matter how nice the motel is. How warm or soft or new the sheets. How cold the AC, how hot and hard the shower. There’s always a stain on the ceiling. It’s something of a comfort, actually. Like maybe this is always the same room. Like maybe his life hasn’t been a string of crappy rooms, ugly square beads on a ribbon of asphalt stretching eighteen years into the past. _Nah._ Stability is for other people. Normal people. The people people like Dean save. 

Dean peeks at Ty, asleep against his shoulder. Ty should be normal, but he had the bad luck of running into Dean. Or maybe he had bad luck all along. Maybe his luck has finally turned around. Dean doubts that, wonders how this will end. Badly, probably. 

He sits up a bit to grab at the sheet tangled and bunched at the foot of the bed. It’s scratchy but it’ll do the job. Dean pulls it over the both of them. Not that he needs the scant warmth of an old, thin motel bedsheet: he’s got a naked body draped across his own and plenty of heat leftover from a particularly good orgasm. He presses his smile into Ty’s hair, inhales him. “Thank you,” he murmurs, rubbing away the goosebumps on the forearm lying on his chest. “You’re a quick learner.”

Huh.

“Hey Ty?” he whispers.

“Mmphf?”

Without shifting a limb, eyes locked on the weird stain, Dean asks, “If you were me, and you picked up a virgin with a fake ID, what would you do?” He can feel Ty’s upper body stiffen around the lie, but he says nothing. “I’m your first?”

He nods.

“And you’re not 21.”

He shakes his head no.

Dean nods once. “How old are you? No lying, or so help me-”

“Sixteen.”

“Shit,” he hisses. Like he’s deflating, and that’s how it feels, too. So much for warmth. “Why? Why lie?”

“You have to ask?”

“Dude,” he says softly, “I could get in trouble for having you in my car, let alone this,” gesturing at the zero space between them. “And with parents like yours to press charges-”

“But they won’t,” Ty says, sitting up, suddenly defensive. “They don’t care, they’ll never know. I’m dead to them, Dean; they don’t care what or who I do.”

“I care, Ty. I have to take you home.” He idly scratches his face. “You deserve better than me. I’ll ruin your life.”

“You wouldn’t. You’re good for me, I know you are.”

“People have a way of ending up dead around me.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true, Ty,” he shouts. “You don’t know what I am.”

“Then tell me,” Ty snaps back.

Dean pinches the bridge of his nose. “Well I’m already boned,” he mutters. _Fuck._ “Okay, uh, get your clothes on, and I’ll show you.”

Once outside, he leads Ty to the back of the Impala. “I’m swearing you to secrecy. You do not breathe a word of this to anyone ever. If you do, I will end you. Swear?”

“I swear.”

Dean checks the periphery before lifting the lid. “You know all those things that go bump in the night?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’m the monster under their beds.” He pulls up the false bottom, laying bare the arsenal. 

Ty gasps. “That’s not for deer hunting.”

“No,” Dean chuckles. “This here’s holy water,” waving a hand over two ordinary looking water jugs. “Salt. Lots of salt. Salt’s good against just about everything. Shotguns for general baddies.” He digs into a box, pulls out something small and holds it up for Ty’s inspection. “My favorite. Silver bullet. For werewolves.” The light of understanding in Ty’s eye elicits another laugh from Dean. “I used to keep one of these babies on a necklace. Like the boys at one of my schools did with normal shells. But Dad decided it was a waste of resources and besides it looked girly.” Dean makes a face. “Story of my life.” He chucks the bullet back into the box and lowers both lids. “So. Not a peep.” 

He locks his lips and flicks away the key. After a beat, he speaks. “You kill monsters.”

“Yup.”

“You save people?”

“Try to.”

“You’re a superhero.”

“No,” he answers emphatically. Shakes his head. “I’m not even a regular hero. I’m an idiot with a knack for weaponry.”

“So’s Batman.”

Dean laughs so hard, he doubles over, throwing a hand on the trunk for balance. He’s crying laughing. “That make you Robin?” he asks, wiping the back of his hand across his eyes.

“Yes.” 

“Ha.”

“Please Dean, I want to help you.” Dean says nothing. “I want to help you save people.”

“I get that. But. I still have to take you home.”

“You can’t. They don’t want me.” 

Dean shakes his head.

“Dean, they’re gonna call the cops, tell them I’m a danger to myself and others, and they’re gonna lock me the hell away. I can’t do that again!”

“Again?”

He nods, lips tight and eyes wide. “I don’t want to go back.”

Dean’s eyes are soft, but they’re dry. “I’m sorry.”

~~~

Dean pulls past the yellow house with the white trim, parks a block away, just to be safe. Ty marvels at how easily he maneuvers the old girl. "Jesus, I failed parallel parking in my mom's Yugo."

"I probably would, too, but Baby's the only car I've ever known," he says, patting the dashboard affectionately. "She's like another limb at this point."

Ty chuckles. "You can't be real."

Dean smiles. Waxing serious, he lets the smile fade. "You probably saved my life yesterday. Thanks for that." He chucks Ty's cheek. "I'm really glad I met you, you know."

"Me too." He looks out the windshield at nothing in particular. "Are you gonna be okay? What are you gonna do now?"

Dean shrugs, scratches his jaw with his knuckles. "My job."

"Isn't it dangerous out there by yourself?"

"No more dangerous than it ever was with three of us."

Ty frowns. "I meant it when I said I want to help you save people. You ever decide you need a Robin, give me a shout."

"Tell you what. If I'm still alive in, what, 500 days, I'll meet you here." Dean smiles a sad, sweet smile. "And if you ever need anything, anything at all, I gave you the number to the Batphone. So, uh, call me. If you want." 

"Thanks." 

Dean looks away as Ty opens the passenger door. "Hey Dean?"

"Yeah?" Dean asks, swinging his head towards Ty. And somehow he’s closed the distance, because his lips are on Dean’s. Ty's hands tugging at Dean's jaw, pulling him closer, closer, kissing him hard, pulling him closer, closer. Ty wrapping long legs around Dean's waist, clinging, pulling him closer, closer, barely breathing but panting. 

"Dean, this is me calling for help. Don't make me go. Let me stay here with you. I'll make you so proud. Let me learn to fight, and I'll stay here with you."

Goddammit, he almost says yes. He wants to scream it. _Goddammit. Six years._ Six fucking years, and maybe sixteen is old enough that he wouldn't get in trouble. Maybe he should say yes. He doesn't need to touch him, not ever, not until he's of age. If he could just keep Ty close, not lose him like he's lost everything else. "No," he breathes. And he hates himself for saying it. He knows the life Ty has in store for him, in a family that hates what he is. "No, I can't. You can't. Family first."

The warmth is gone. No legs, no lips, no sweet warm breath on his mouth. Just a snarl and an emptiness. "Fuck you then," Ty growls. "I hope you stick around so you can watch them cart me away, you spineless bastard." 

“Ty, please.” But he vanishes before Dean can blink. Dean turns to see him stalking up the sidewalk. At the mailbox, he shoots a bird at the Impala. 

Dean slumps forward, bashes his forehead against the steering wheel, twice, three times. He groans. “Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Six fucking years.” He wallows a moment longer before reaching for his phone. “Yeah. I’ll call Dad. He’ll come back if he knows I need him. Dad’ll come back.” But as he thumbs to John’s name in the contact list, he begins to shake. _He won’t come back. Why should he? He got away. He doesn’t need me. He doesn’t want me. He stayed for Sammy, and now he’s gone and they’re both gone._ “Jesus Christ,” he whispers. “Don’t fall apart. Don’t fall apart. Fuck.” He scrolls down to Sammy’s name and looks at the highlighted name. _Don’t call him. He’s happy, he’s out. Leave him alone._ But the shaking gets worse. And the screen gets blurry. _Don’t cry. Dad hates when you cry. Be a man, Dean. You’re a soldier, not a crybaby, Dean._ “FUCK!” he screams.

A gunshot echoes down the quiet street.


	3. Shock and Awe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “This will either work or it’ll be the worst mistake of my life,” he comments calmly as he crouches in the grass next to the passenger seat.

Before the echoes die away, Dean’s on his feet and out the door, his own panic forgotten, replaced with a new rising fear. _Don’t be Ty. Don’t be Ty._

_Fuck, it’s Ty._ He’s running. He’s covered in blood. 

“What did you do?” Dean asks, catching up, latching on.

“He’ll probably live. We gotta go.”

“You shot him?”

“No, he fucking shot me! Come on, hurry!” Ty opens the door awkwardly with his left hand, slides in. “Come on, come on!”

_I’m going to Hell._ Dean’s in the driver’s seat and turning the key before he thinks to check the street behind them. No one in the rearview. One minor miracle.

“Can you die from a bullet in the arm?” Ty asks thickly.

“We’ll get you patched up.”

“He shot me and I snatched up his gun and I beat him with it. I don’t think I killed him. He’ll probably live. Shame. Mom called the cops. I ran. You were still here. Probably good. How long would it take to die of a bullet in the arm?”

“Nobody’s dying. You’re fine. Hang in there, Ty.” Dean shrugs out of his flannel, the red one with the close-set checker pattern. He hates to see it ruined, but the purplish maroon will probably camouflage a bloodstain. Anyways, until he can get to the medical kit in the trunk, this is probably the cleanest sop rag he can offer. “Here, put this over it and press down, hard as you can. Where’d he get you?”

“Upper arm- ow.” He winces, sucks in a hissing breath. “Motherfuck.”

Dean’s jaw tightens. “You’re doing fine. I just gotta get us somewhere safe. Keep the pressure on it.”

“Get back on 89 South. The cemetery. Or head for the mountains.”

_Is this 89 or State Street?_ Both; he takes the turn a little too sharply and grinds against the curb. “Sorry, baby,” he says reflexively.

“I’m okay. Oh shit.”

“What?”

“It’s soaked.”

“The shirt?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.” The road runs pretty straight here. All the same, Dean struggles to keep the car in the lane as he wrestles with his belt, wrenching it free from the loops. “Do you know how to do this? Buckle it over your sleeve, above the bullet hole.”

“My arm is too skinny.”

“There are holes all the way down. Find the one that fits and cinch it tight. I’ll pull over as soon as I can.  
Hang in there.” Metal rasps on leather. “Did you get it?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

“How you feeling?” His whole face is furrowed with worry. “Hot, cold, sleepy?”

“No.” 

“You breathing okay? Slow normal breaths.”

“’Kay. Hurts like hell, Dean. I stink of blood.”

“I know, buddy, we’ll get you cleaned up, hang in there.”

He pulls into the cemetery and finds a clump of trees that seem to offer a bit of privacy. “Just a sec,” he promises, hopping out. 

The medical kit stores just under the left-hand side of the compartment, next to the spare bag of rock salt. Or it should. There’s a huge hole where it should be. “Son of a bitch,” Dean mutters. “A place for everything and everything in its place, assholes. Especially the first-aid shit.” He digs a little deeper and finds a roll of gauze, still in the packaging, and a half-empty bottle of rotgut. His hand floats over the toolkit as he debates whether anything there might help. “Hell with it,” he decides, grabbing the handle, as well as a blowtorch. Nothing like performing surgery with greasy, fire-sterilized pliers.

“This will either work or it’ll be the worst mistake of my life,” he comments calmly as he crouches in the grass next to the passenger seat. “The first aid kit is missing. We’ll have to improvise.”

Ty closes his eyes, holds out the damaged arm as best he can. “Okay, Macgyver away.”

Dean smiles in spite of himself. He tosses the bloody flannel onto the ground beside him. He rinses his hands under a stream of whiskey, rubs them together, repeats. He shakes them dry before touching Ty. Turning the arm one way, then the other, gently as he can manage, he finds that the bleeding has mostly stopped. Two wounds, barely. “He grazed you. Entrance here, exit here,” he points. “But see how close they are.” He shakes his head. “Either he knew just where to aim or he’s a crappy shot.”

Ty looks down at his lap. Dean can almost feel the waves of guilt rolling off the kid.

“Not a crappy shot, then,” Dean surmises. “Ty. Look at me.” He searches out his eyes. “Ty, he shot you. Whether he did it in a nice way or not, that sonofabitch shot his own kid. Okay?”

“Yeah.”

Dean’s not satisfied with the response, and he’s not relinquishing eye contact until he is. “Hey. This was his choice. Not yours, okay? Not your fault, right?”

“Okay. Yeah. I hear you,” he stammers. 

Dean nods, returns his attention to the bullet wounds in front of him. “There’s not much I can do here, Ty. Stitches won’t do any good. Your tricep is trashed, though. I don’t know what to do about that.” He nods again. “How important is that shirt to you?”

“Not very.”

“Good, because I’m taking it off you so I can clean you up.” Dean loosens the makeshift tourniquet; the clots seem to hold. “Keep your arm still so it doesn’t break open again.” He pulls out a small folding knife and cuts a swath through the sleeve of the tee. “What happened to the blazer?”

“Threw it down before I asked him did he wanna go. Guess he did,” a mirthless smile on his lips.

“Oh.” Dean stands. “I need water and a towel. Be right back.” Holy water will do, and a clean washcloth from his bag. A spare shirt and another flannel for a sling. “Not gonna lie, this is gonna hurt like hell.” 

“It already hurts like hell.” 

He soaks the washcloth in water and carefully bathes Ty’s arm and hands and wipes a smudge from where he had absentmindedly scratched his cheek. 

“That’s not so bad.”

“That’s not the bad part.” Dean holds Ty’s hand, slowly pulls the arm a bit straighter, until it crosses the frame of the door. Then he uncaps the whiskey again and pours a bracing shot over the wounds. 

Ty’s teeth clamp down. “Oh,” he groans.

Dean tears open the gauze and winds it around Ty’s arm. “We’ll watch it for bleeding for the next day or so.” He plants a small kiss over the gauze, over the site. “Your first red badge of courage,” he whispers, affixing the soft sling around Ty’s neck. Ty catches his eye and pins him in place. “I’m sorry you got shot," Dean says at last. "I’m sorry I put you in that situation.”

“No, Dean, you didn’t-”

“I knew not to bring you back here, but I thought I was doing the right thing,” he says, slumping back on his heels. 

“His choice, not yours. Remember?”

Dean nods, gently smiles. “You’re a brave patient, and I’m proud of you. Come on, let’s get the hell out of Dodge.” He tucks the seatbelt around Ty, then snatches the blanket out of the backseat and covers his knees. “You start feeling cold, though, you let me know right away.” 

He doesn’t realize how far he’s strayed into Ty’s airspace until his lips capture Dean’s. “Thanks.”

Dean huffs a breath, a non-reply, and retreats. Drops the equipment back in the trunk and pulls a couple of granola bars and juice boxes from the emergency stash of iron rations.

From the driver’s seat, he opens one of each, hands them over. “Here, some sugar to keep you going until we can stop for real food.” And they drive. 

 

~~~

 

Even Dean has to admit that he’s acting a bit paranoid. He drives north to I-80 so he can get them out of Utah as fast as possible and heading the opposite direction, in case they were spotted moving south. He’s spiraling as far away from the domestic in Provo, Utah, as he can reasonably get in a day, without driving in a straight line. He wants to get to a good can’t-get-there-from-here city. 

Over burgers in Denver, Dean congratulates Ty again for his badassery. “I’ve never seen a civilian take a bullet like that.”

“Thanks, Dean,” Ty mumbles, not sure if he should be proud of this particular achievement.

“I mean it: I’ve seen bigger men cry over less. Hell, I’ve seen them die over less.” That gives Dean pause, but he soon shakes the thoughts away and continues, “If you’re gonna travel with me, I want to teach you how to be a hunter. Not that we’ll go looking for trouble,” he adds, tossing Ty a pointed look over his coffee cup, “but, well, trouble has a way of finding me.”

“Okay.” Ty’s trying not to sound overenthusiastic, but it’s clear that the offer means a lot to him.

Dean tests him anyway. “You’re not just staying because you think you have to, right? Because you’ve got nowhere else to go?”

Ty shakes his head. “I want to,” he replies, softer than is necessary. 

_Yeah, okay._ “Nothing about the job is safe. You get back in my car, you probably don’t live to see eighteen.” 

Ty munches a shoestring potato and contemplates that, before replying, “The odds of that weren’t very good this morning.”

“Good point.” Dean picks up his water glass, sets it down again, twirls the bottom against the Formica. “There’s something else.” 

“What’s that?”

He takes a sip, slow to swallow. He’s still toying with the cup when he finally lets his gaze drift to Ty. “We can’t keep sleeping together.”

“Dean, I-”

“No. Ty, just being around you- Look, I’ve had trouble enough checking into motels with my brother, and Sammy’s two years older than you.” _Son of a bitch, that’s true._ “This age thing changes everything. I mean, I like having you around,” and he ducks his head opposite Ty’s broad smile, “but it’s not gonna be easy. It’s gonna mean sleeping in the car and roughing it. God forbid, camping.”

“You don’t like camping?”

“Hate it.”

Ty laughs. “Why?”

“Why? Why wouldn't I? It’s, I dunno, dirty and sweaty and the showers, when you can get ’em, the showers suck. Mosquitoes fucking love me. The Impala getting stuck or scratched up on rough trails. And sleeping on the ground is bad enough, but I always manage to sleep uphill.”

“What does that mean?”

“You know when you put your tent on a slight incline and you don’t know it until your head is lower than your feet? Sleeping uphill.”

Amused, Ty comments, “I thought white people loved camping.” 

“Well, this white people does not.”

“Badass hunter and you’re rattled by sleeping in a tent?” He’s still chuckling at Dean. “Uphill.” He sits back, folds his good arm across his belly. “Tell you what, you teach me how to fight monsters, and I’ll teach you normal hunting. Including how to live in the great outdoors.”

“Deal.”

 

~~~

 

Eight hours later, they’re on the hood of the Impala in a grassy field outside Amarillo, stargazing. Except that Dean is dozing, and Ty is wide awake.

“Dean?”

“Mrmph?”

“Your hand is on my knee.”

“Sorry.”

“I like it. Wake up, or I’m gonna move your hand north.”

“Hmph.” He shakes off sleep. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing. I just like this.” Ty shrugs. “Check it out, there’s a fox in the tall grass over there. You see it?”

“Mmm.”

“You’re not even awake.”

“No, I’m awake.”

“Hey Dean?”

“Mmmph?”

“You’re asleep.”

“No, I’m asleep.”

Ty nudges Dean, the shoulder of his good arm pressing firmly against the solid sleeping mass. He whispers softly into Dean’s ear, “Shooting stars.”

He wakes up somewhat. He's still groggy, but the first good streak of white pulls him out of sleep. “Make a wish,” he says reflexively.

Neither says anything for some minutes, watching the Perseids light up the sky.

Dean reaches in his jacket pocket for his pack of smokes. “Want one?” he asks.

"No thanks, I don't really smoke. Just to be sociable." He watches Dean flick the Zippo, watches the cherry catch. "But I'll take a drag."

Dean brings his hand to Ty's mouth to offer him the end. A faint thrill shivers through him as Ty’s lips close over the filter, brush Dean's fingertips. He regrets suddenly what he said at the diner, knowing the softness of those lips on his own, wishing for more soft, anxious kisses pressed into his skin. He wants ... He wants Ty. 

"Now if it was a joint,” Ty’s saying, “I'd be all over that."

Dean laughs. "As it happens," he begins, fishing out the package again, “I found a little something in the trunk while I was looking for bandages." He shakes a small baggie into his palm, holds it out for Ty's inspection. "Don't know how old it is, couldn't tell you if it's good, I don't even know who bought it, but it's ours now. You wanna spark?"

"Do it!" Ty cheers. 

The fox that’s been watching them suddenly bolts, spooked. "Stop screaming like a girl," Dean jokes, "you're scaring the wildlife!"

They've each had a toke or two, no more, when Ty notices the fog swirling up from the warm ground. "Looks spooky," he observes.

"You don't know spooky. One time-" but he's interrupted by a dog lurching out of the tall grass from which the fox has just disappeared. "Oh, so that was it."

The dog, a big lean hunting type, lopes over to Ty and demands his attention. He happily reaches down and scratches the big lug behind one ear. "Hey bud, where'd you come from?"

"Sirius! Heel!"

The dog looks at Ty once before returning the way he came. Seconds later, an older man emerges from the ground fog as well. He looks downright ancient. A craggy brown face from long years under the sun, gnarled hands wrapped around a walking stick, as long and thin as his own frame. He looks Mexican and native American but also Indian. He's got a bow slung across his torso and a quiver of arrows at his hip. He looks upon the boys lounging on the vintage car with blind eyes.

"Evening," Dean calls companionably.

The old man says nothing for several moments, listening, turning his head this way and that, sensing. 

The dog sits patiently at his master's side. At length, the ancient speaks. "Something is watching you. You are under its protection; you are at its whim."

Dean and Ty look at each other, not sure how to respond. They turn back to see the old man retreating to the taller grass. "Wait," Ty shouts, "what does that mean?" But he's gone.

"Dean?" Ty asks, eyes locked on the mist.

"Yup?"

"Did that just happen?"

"Yup."

"I think I'm done with the pot for now."

“Yup.”


	4. Camping Is Supposed to Be Fun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean and Ty settle in at the campsite. Apparently, it's a sleepover.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Portions of this chapter inspired by this tumblr [post](http://last-url-in-tumbldom.tumblr.com/post/70996515203/ssjdebusk-friendly-reminder-that-it-is-canon)

The dawn finds the boys in the front seat, curled together for warmth, the blanket on the floorboard before them. Dean wakes first, stretches as unobtrusively as he can, and still manages to wake Ty. 

“Morning, sunshine.”

“Morning, schmorning,” Ty grumps.

“Oh it gets better. Time for my least favorite part of training: jogging.”

Ty smiles. “Easy. I love running.”

“Great, then why don’t you go get the lay of the land, and I’ll stay here and sleep,” pulling the blanket off the floor and over his head.

“Come on, Dean. It’ll be fun,” he promises.

“It will most certainly not be fun,” Dean mumbles. But as Ty unbuttons his shirt, Dean feels a bit more sanguine about the exercise. 

He digs through his bag for a pair of gym shorts before remembering that Ty has nothing. Literally, he’s left with nice-ish sneakers, socks, a pair of slacks, and the Joe Boxers with fucking smiley faces on them. And all blood-stained. Dean glances up at Ty. “Hey, take these,” he says, tossing him the shorts. “I think I have another pair in here somewhere.” He finds a second pair in the spare bag Sammy left in the trunk. 

They head back to the road first, to see in daylight where they are. They’d turned first onto a gravel side street, or more accurately, a driveway, from which splinter three more driveways. Two lead to large farmhouses, possibly McMansions to judge by the manicured lawns and utter lack of agriculture, each set a good half mile from the junction. The third amounts to a continuation of the original stretch, barely a track, little more than ruts, probably carved into the hard dry ground by a wide-set pick-up truck. Even driving in the night before, it had been clear to Dean that the path hadn’t been used in some time; he’d felt the overgrown weeds scraping the underbelly of the Impala. The track bisects a long, thin strip of property. Fences and spindly pines run along either side, leading to a heavy gate, rendered almost useless by the thick Johnson grass growing up around it. This is where they’re parked. 

With a quick glance at Ty, Dean hops the gate and disappears into the tall grass. When Ty joins him, they find that the fence widens into a cattle pasture after another few yards. They step gingerly over the rusted stock grid on the ground and out onto the meadow. “This way,” Dean gestures, and they jog along the fence, counter-clockwise, maybe three miles around. The boundary is solid, unbroken, just trees and fence posts. They encounter no signs of man, and precious little evidence of animals, either, though they hear squirrels chittering from one of the clumps of pines dotting the field. There’s not much to see at all, aside from grass, desiccated oak trees, uprooted and broken, and a good-sized pond, not too scummy, with a decent fish population. Dean rubs his hands together when he spots a bream in the water: “Let’s get me a fishing pole, and we’ll eat good!”

For all his enthusiasm over the fish pond, though, Dean is a hot cranky mess by the time they finish the circuit. “Well, that was fun,” he snarks as they walk back to the Impala for fresh clothes and a cold shower from a jug of holy water and a handful of baby wipes. Dean’s not looking forward to this wilderness camping thing. He stops to scrub his flushed face with the collar of his shirt and catches a whiff of himself. He makes a disgusted noise in his throat. “I swear, I smell like come.”

Ty laughs. Stepping closer, he sniffs Dean’s neck. Then he licks him. 

“What the hell, dude?” Dean exclaims. But curious, he asks, “I taste like it, too?”

Ty has to shrug. “Hell if I know, actually. _Someone_ I know won’t let me suck his dick.”

“It’s for your own good,” Dean mutters. But the lips on his pulse are doing things to his resolve. Namely, weakening it. He doesn’t mean to press his hand against the back of Ty’s head, any more than he means to let his other hand land softly on the boy’s hip. “I can’t, Ty,” he whines.

“Should I stop?” he whispers, thumbing Dean’s hipbone under his waistband.

The inhuman noise Dean makes hardly counts as a no, but it’s all Ty needs to hear before slipping his hand past the elastic. “Bu-uh-oh!” Dean clarifies.

A soft chuckle from Ty, and Dean’s surrendering. He grasps Ty’s face in both hands, fucking his tongue into his mouth as his hips grind into his hand. 

Standing in a field in Oklahoma, equal parts blissed out and wigged out, Dean Winchester begins to wonder what the hell happened to his life. Starts to wonder how he got to the point where he’s letting a skinny _kid_ jack him off in his pants, in a field in motherfucking Oklahoma. He feels dirty, from the run as much as from _this_ , whatever this is, and he feels fucking amazing, too. He should end this, he should run for his life, and yet all he can think is how much this stupid kid means to him after way too little time. _There’s still a chance to break free_ , he thinks, and he knows it’s a lie. 

His hand still cradles Ty’s cheek. “Thank you,” he whispers, bestowing a kiss on his stupid perfect cupid’s-bow lips. Louder, more confidently, he jokes, “You’re lucky I have no willpower.”

“No shit, Sherlock; it’s been, what, a whole twenty-four hours?”

Dean blushes, releases Ty’s face. “Not even,” he sighs.

 

~~~

 

“Seems to me that we have lucked into a conveniently abandoned field,” Dean comments as he drags a clean shirt over his damp torso. He’s already nearly dry, except for the wet spot at the back of his neck where his hair won’t stop dripping. He pulls it into a ponytail and hopes the heat will work its magic soon. He tries not to notice as Ty pulls on a pair of his boxers. Dean’s forgotten how much he likes the hollows of a guy butt. _Girl butt’s nice,_ he thinks, _all round and squishy, an ass you can squeeze._ But Ty’s got one of those bony dude butts, no meat on it. He wants to fit his fists to the hollow cheeks of that ass again, like he did in that crappy motel room. He sits down heavily on the trunk of the car and shakes his head clear. 

“What are you thinking?” Ty asks. 

“What?” Dean asks too sharply.

“Do we stay here or press on?”

“Oh.” Dean rubs at the back of his neck. “If we could get rid of the grass here, we could swing the car through the gate and set up camp on the other side.”

Ty shrugs his approval. Staying here for the foreseeable future, they agree, will allow them to train in relative comfort and security. 

First order of business, though, is a shopping trip. Problem is, they are smack-dab in the middle of nowhere. Dean can’t tell from the map if they’re better off going to Amarillo or Santa Fe for provisions, or back north into Colorado. But Ty’s never been to Texas, and they’re practically there, so they head towards Amarillo. Fortunately, they find a tiny town just inside the border with an army/navy surplus store and a thrift store that sells by the pound. They hit the thrift store and turn up three pairs of jeans, two pairs of cargo pants (even though Dean says they suck for jobs, Ty’s optimistic), a half-dozen tees, four decent flannels, and a thick cotton jacket with enough pockets to satisfy his evident fetish. Add in a backpack to tote it all, and Ty doesn’t spend $20. Dean lets him pay cash for such a piddling amount; not worth pulling out the fake plastic. 

In the same shopping center is a barber shop. Dean looks very seriously at the sign, as he toys with the short blond ponytail, gauging the length, running the gathered ends across his palm like a tightly packed brush. “If we’re roughing it,” he muses, “I should probably cut my hair.”

“No, please don’t.” 

Dean spins around, surprised. He hadn’t thought Ty was paying him any attention. He certainly doesn’t expect Ty to care one way or the other about his hair. “Why not?”

Ty looks shy. “Because I like it?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s cute.”

Dean tries to look insulted. “Shut up, I look awesome.”

Ty stammers, “That’s what I meant, not cute, um.”

Dean smiles, turns back to the darkened window-mirror before him and resumes assessing his hair. He pulls out the elastic, unconsciously slipping it back on his wrist. “Takes too much soap to get it clean and too much water to get the soap out. Look, it’s still wet. It never fucking dries.”

Ty shrugs. “Do it if you have to,” he says, reaching for the elastic band on Dean’s wrist and securing the ponytail, “but I might have an answer.” 

Dean wants to stop him. Ty touching his hair in public is making Dean nervous, especially in this podunk backwater. And yet, it feels nice. He thinks back to the girl who sat behind him and combed his hair with her fingers during class. That was when? Seventh grade? Eighth grade? Hell, he couldn’t even remember the girl’s name. _Shayna, maybe._ But it had felt good; he was sorry to move away that time. “What’s your answer?”

Ty’s turning Dean’s face left then right, walking around him in a circle, pulling the ponytail until Dean’s head tips backwards and his eyes fall closed. _Nope, never cutting this hair ever,_ he thinks.

Satisfied, Ty just mumbles, “We’ll see.”

His cryptic interest in Dean’s hair takes a turn in the army/navy store. Between filling the cart with camping and fishing gear, he finds a comb and a package of tiny rubber bands and throws them in the basket, too. Then Ty tosses Dean a small bottle. “Whaddya think?”

“Dry shampoo? Huh. It’s worth a try.”

Aside from fishing tackle, they also get a spare sleeping bag, a Dutch oven and a cheap pot with some flimsy dishes, a camp shower, a mega-deluxe first-aid kit to replace the one that never made it back into the trunk, and those tablets that purify fresh water. 

At the grocery, they stock up: jerky, canned soups with pop-tops, some kind of meat-in-a-can shit, salt and pepper; onions, taters, carrots, and foil; sliced bread, peanut butter, this marshmallow spread that Ty likes; apples, cinnamon, oats, and a couple of jars of instant coffee; plus a few jugs of water, paper products and soap. Dean has a trick for fresh-baked bread, so they invest in measuring cups, a bag of flour, and a cake of yeast. And Dean buys Natty Lite and a carton of Newports with actual real money, for which Ty is proud of him. 

When they get back to the campsite, they realize that they have nowhere to keep their food out of reach of animals, except in the Impala or in the tent. And speaking of, they also realize that they should have bought the tent they’d seen on clearance: the ancient holey tent in the trunk has seen better days. 

“Looks like we’ll be sleeping under the stars whether we have a tent or not,” Dean quips, somewhat apologetically.

 

~~~

 

“Ready for lesson number one of wilderness camping?” Ty asks when they’d squared away their new purchases.

“Not really,” Dean jokes. 

“Fire.”

“I can do fire,” he says slowly, “but, uh, not for camping.”

Ty frowns. “Why then?”

The grimace on Dean’s face dims as he steels himself. “Okay, lesson number one of hunting freaky shit: salt and burn your dead friends so they don’t come back and haunt your ass.”

Ty lets a whistled breath escape. “Really?”

“Yup,” he affirms, looking at his hands. “You gotta build a funeral pyre. You salt it, uh, the body, you light it up, and you sit there and wait until it’s all ash. Pretty grim.” He shifts uncomfortably and his eyes go soft. “If I ever yell at you or tell you you’re doing something wrong, it’s not that I’m mad,” he whispers. “It’s that, in my head, I just built your pyre.”

A shudder passes through Ty. 

Dean shakes off the mood, stands, paces. “Usually when we encounter a ghost, we head over to the local cemetery, dig up the ghost’s grave, and salt and burn. Not that it’s always so easy. But ghosts aren’t the most sophisticated bad guys in my life.”

Ty nods, dazed. The truth of Dean’s words seeps in slowly, permeating through the cracks in Ty’s immature, imperfectly formed understanding of reality. Maybe he’s still young enough to believe that werewolves and ghosts are real. He has never doubted Dean, never felt fear or unease. He’s never suspected that the man was anything but what he said he was. And yet to be confronted with the inevitability of death in this, his newly chosen profession. Monsters be damned; Death is the real boogeyman in Dean’s life. 

“Right. Okay, Dean, something normal. Make us a campfire.”

 

~~~

 

While Dean builds the fire, Ty pitches the tent. While Dean fusses over dinner, Ty fashions a firewall out of rocks and sets up thick logs as seats around the perimeter. 

“You know there’s only two of us out here, right?” Dean teases.

“This will make it easier to move away from the smoke. Do we have any wire cutters?” 

Dean finds him the tool and moves his foil pouches to the fire. “How long do these stay in?”

“You chop them small?”

Dean curls his forefinger against his thumb in a rough approximation. “Pretty small. Not too small.”

Ty nods. “Just leave them there until we’re ready to eat. Less than an hour, I’d say.”

When Ty comes back with a length of stolen chicken wire, Dean is lounging against one of the stumps, one boot propped on a hot rock, a bag of marshmallows in his lap. 

“Those are for roasting, not eating out of the bag!” Ty scolds as he places the wire mesh across the fire pit. But as he returns from putting away the tinsnips, he calls out, “Toss me one.”

“Your fox was back. Did you know that foxes like marshmallows?” 

“Weird. Why would you even know that?”

“I threw one at him, and he ate it. So I threw him a few more. Cute little asshole better not steal our food.”

“Of course he will, if you keep feeding him,” Ty laughs and sits down on the stump immediately behind Dean. “Sit up.”

“Dude, there’s a dozen places you could sit.”

“I got one more chore before we eat. Sit up.”

“Yessir.” 

Ty positions himself so his knees bracket Dean’s shoulders. “Comfy?”

“Yup.” Then he gasps, as Ty pulls the ponytail holder out of Dean’s hair. He’s dragging a comb through the thick locks, straightening, smoothing, parting. Dean sighs. 

Ty isolates a chunk of hair and begins plaiting. 

Dean’s happy trance snaps. “Hey, what’re you doing?”

“What does it look like? I’m braiding your hair. My girl cousins taught me how to make cornrows. It should help keep your hair in order.”

Dean doesn’t respond, and for a second, Ty thinks he’s angry. Then he chuckles. “Braiding my hair? That is- Jesus Christ, that’s adorable! You sissy.”

Ty tugs at his hair, pulling Dean’s ear closer to his mouth. Dean whimpers. “Listen, you do not want to start calling names.” He twists the hair between his fingers and drops his voice to a bare whisper. “Cocksucker.”

Dean laughs, his mouth falling into a toothy lopsided grin, and he’s rewarded with another yank of his hair. His eyes roll back in his head, and he doesn’t say another word until Ty finishes his work and calls for his dinner.


	5. Love and Monsters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Is this what boys do on a sleepover?

They've developed a routine. The first one awake fixes the fire and puts a pot of water on to boil. After a run, they trade off breakfast duties while the other showers. The morning is usually spent on target practice of some sort or cleaning the guns or just bullshitting by the fire until lunch. Swapping stories. How to kill stuff, what weapons to use. 

Dean tells Ty about the times when Bobby tried to get him and his kid brother to shoot Bambi. 

“Some hunter you are. You mean to tell me you’ve never shot an animal?”

“No, I’m telling you I’ve never shot a deer.”

“But smaller animals are fair game, so to speak?”

Dean shrugs. “Dad had us shoot at squirrels and birds for target practice sometimes. But neither of us ever hit much.” He sips at his coffee solemnly. “Huh, forgot about that. Anyways,” he continues, a small smile growing, “I can drop a shifter at twenty feet, and that’s with a sawed-off. And Sammy’s even better. So there’s that.”

Ty chuckles. “You’re a big softie. Still, I found a quail’s nest the other day, and I’ve seen rabbits and turkeys in the pasture, so if you wanna eat something other than fish and meat-in-a-can, you have to get over yourself.”

And so, in the afternoons, Ty might show Dean how to field-dress his kill; Dean might show Ty a little something about first-aid. Then comes the ritual of making dinner and wasting the rest of the night drinking coffee and staring into the fire. Telling tales. This is when their histories unfold. They speak of family, of disappointed fathers, of cherished baby brothers. They speak of hiding their true selves. At least, Ty does; Dean shies away from the touchy-feely chick-flick moments. Much easier to talk about his secret identity as a hunter of the supernatural. Dean tells real-live ghost stories, the darkness of his past haunting the campsite. They watch the stars until the fire burns to coals. They haven’t quite mastered the hands-off relationship Dean would rather they lived, nor can he bring himself to separate the sleeping bags Ty zipped together as a joke on their very first night in the tent. In fact, he finds it increasingly difficult to resist snatching up the long, lean body beside him and tucking Ty’s bony back close to his chest. 

 

~~~

 

“Hey Dean? What’s the notebook in the glovebox?”

“The notebook? Oh. That’s my journal. Lots of hunters keep one: notes on kills, what worked, what didn’t. Well, less of the latter. If it didn’t work, you’re probably not doing a lot of writing from the great beyond.”

Ty stands a moment, hesitating.

Dean looks up through his lashes at Ty. “You want to see it?” he asks, largely unamused.

“Well, not if-”

“Nah, it’s fine,” Dean says as he pulls himself from his seat near the fire. “Best way to learn what’s really out there.” He retrieves it without complaint, but handing it over costs him some consternation. “Here,” tossing the worn spiral-bound gently into Ty’s lap. “Don’t say I never did nothing for you.”

Ty glances up, worried that Dean might actually be upset about this intrusion, but he’s wearing a grin. “Thanks, Dean.” 

He huffs and settles himself again before the fire. “It’s not as neat and organized as Dad’s. Now that is a hunter’s journal.” He looks around for his coffee cup. “Too bad the beer’s gone,” he muses. “We should make a run tomorrow.” His hands twitch and scratch and flutter self-consciously as Ty reads. “I should make a list. Beer, peanut butter, veggies. A little bit of everything, really.” He’s babbling; he’s nervous. “So. Whaddya think?”

“Dean?” Ty asks, sitting taller and catching Dean’s eyes.

“Yeah?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Dean scoffs. “Just read the damn book,” he replies, trying hard to keep the irritation out of his voice. _So what if Ty reads your journal? Don’t be an asshole._ Yet he can’t help feeling anxious at the thought of anyone, even Ty, reading his bullshit.

Ty fixes him with a glare, and Dean decides to walk away to preserve the peace. A spoon and the dutch oven go with him, and he squats on the hood as he polishes off the last of the cobbler.

As he washes the pot, though, he manages to slosh half of the bucket of soapy water onto his t-shirt. “Shit,” he murmurs softly. He strips off both his shirts, gives the wet one a thorough cleaning, and hangs it on the line alongside yesterday’s laundry. Grabbing a new tee and pulling it over his head, he’s struck again by the scent of pond water, cheap bar soap, and sunshine. Who knew that would become his favorite combination of smells? It is the smell of their clean clothes; it is also the smell of Ty and of the sleeping bags they share.

He reclaims his seat at the fire and earns another glare.

“Nope, just gonna sit here. Not a peep, promise.” He turns his attention to a half-dozen guns in need of a thorough inspection.

Some long moments of silence pass at the fireside. Dean notices a scowl on Ty’s face. “Whatcha got?”

“These girls’ names. Are they-”

Dean chokes out a laugh. “Yeah.”

“…But they’re all girls.”

“Yeah,” he responds flatly.

“Is that a code?”

“Nope,” giving a slight shake of his head. "Bi."

"But ... you’re a guy virgin?”

Dean sucks in a long breath and blows it out. “Not exactly. Probably 1995. I, uh, I had an opportunity to get out of the life. I don’t want to go into it, but, for a while there, I was on my own. Without Dad and Sammy. I felt like a normal kid, you know, for the first time since I was tiny. I met the love of my life. Robin.”

“She’s not in here.”

“Nope. No, she’s not. There weren’t any names then.” He smiles sadly. “Hell, Robin was my first kiss! Anyway, it couldn’t last. Nothing ever does. And Dad’s timing was, huh, impeccable. In the end, it was my choice to leave. I couldn’t leave Sammy alone with Dad while I lived some crap apple-pie life without him. They never got along; they would never have survived Sammy’s teens, not with the weaponry they had access to.” It’s meant to be a joke, but Dean can’t manage to huff a laugh at it. “But uh, I never quite shook the feeling that Dad didn’t care how bad it fucked me up, having to leave that place.” He sniffs. “‘It couldn’t last, nothing ever does’ became my mantra. Which twisted into a ‘love ’em and leave ’em fast’ sort of attitude.” Dean pauses. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this.”

“Not exactly a virgin,” Ty prompts.

“Not my point. Okay, so I fucked a lot of girls after that. Go ahead, tell me I’m an asshole; everyone does.”

Ty looks at the book in his hands, says nothing.

“Skip ahead to junior year. First day at another new school, and I see this girl who, I’m telling you, she looks exactly like Robin. I go up to talk to her and I realize at the last minute, too late actually, that it’s not her. But we get to talking, and I’m thinking, ‘This is fate!’” He rubs idly at his forehead. “She’s one of those that wants to take it slow, which is cool. I’m weirdly okay with it. Takes the pressure off, you know.” He glances at Ty and flinches away from his rapt attention. “Joanna fucking Harper, Jesus Christ.”

Ty’s already flipping pages. “Joanna. Right, the page with the dick doodles. Classy.”

An incongruous laugh bursts from Dean. “She was… she was hot, man, like, probably the hottest girl in school.” He smiles softly to himself. “One day, though, she asks me to hang out with her after school. Asks if I’ll take the bus home with her. There’s something she wants to give me. Just like that. ‘There’s something I want to give you.’ That was the first time I ever rode a school bus. It was weird as hell, man, all these kids crammed into the bus; it was like _Lord of the Flies_. The bus driver didn’t even care. And Joanna, she always picked the hump seat, she called it, the one over the back tire. Said she liked having a place to put her feet up. She took me home on her bus and she kissed me in the hump seat. She said I was her first kiss from a boy. But I didn’t believe her. She didn’t kiss like a girl. She kissed like she kissed girls.”

 

~~~

 

“I made cookies last night. You want some?”

“Sure.” 

She strode out of the living room and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Dean alone in front of the television. She returned with a plateful of wrinkly chocolate chip cookies, thin and crisp and delicious. 

Dean was in raptures. “You have no idea how good it is to eat something homemade,” he moaned. 

Joanna giggled. “You sound like you’re having sex with those cookies.”

“If I could figure out a way to have sex with them, I would. Oh my god, woman, these are incredible!” He found her eyes. “You’re incredible,” he murmured, leaning in for a kiss. It felt so good, that kiss. Sometimes hot, sometimes slow. “I want you.”

“No, you don’t,” she drawled. But she untucked her shirt, let his hands wander north. “I’m sorry I’m so flat, Dean.”

“Don’t be,” he whispered back. “I kinda like it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Oh Joanna, what are you doing with me? I don’t deserve you.”

“Me too. I mean-” 

They laughed softly. 

“I know,” he murmured as she ran her hands through his hair, down his spine, up his sides. She clutched his butt. 

Dean rolled off of Joanna, pulled her on top of him. He looked at her hungrily. “I want you,” he repeated. 

She shook her head. “But there’s something I want to give you.”

“What’s that?” he breathed, and she pulled herself to her knees. Sitting astride Dean’s legs, she tugged at the button of his jeans. He gasped as she exposed him, her fingers like fire against his hard, smooth skin. “Joanna.”

“Let me blow you?”

Dean nodded dumbly, marveling that she would be his first. _Hottest girl in school,_ he thought, before thought gave way to sensation. 

_How could this be so different from fucking,_ he wondered afterward, Joanna draped over him, his arms wrapped tight around her, his nose buried in her hair. She smelled like raspberries. “Thank you,” he whispered against her skull. 

“Thank you, Dean,” she purred. “Was that okay?” 

“It was awesome!” He pulled her into a kiss. He could just taste a slight saltiness on her tongue. “Is that me?” 

“Mm-hmm,” she murmured. “You taste so good.” 

“Can I, uh, can I return the favor?” 

“No, baby. Better not.” She hesitated. “Question: why would you like my chest?” 

“Huh?” 

“You don’t mind that I don’t have tits?” 

Dean shook his head. “Makes you look like a guy.” 

“Why would you say that?” Not just defensive; almost frightened. 

“No, hey, I’m sorry. That was stupid… Look.” He sighed. “I’ll tell you a secret, if you promise not to tell anyone.” 

“What?” 

“Promise?” 

“I swear.” 

“I kinda wanna be with a guy.” 

Her eyes went wide. “Why would you say that?” 

Dean tried to laugh it off. “What? No, it’s a joke.” But his eyes told a different story. He avoided her gaze. 

“You mean it,” she guessed. 

He still couldn’t look at her, but he nodded. 

“I’ll tell you a secret, if you promise not to tell anyone,” she whispered against his ear. 

Again he nodded. “I swear.” 

She hesitated, like she couldn’t decide what to say. Instead, she sat up on her knees, hiked up her skirt, and rummaged in her pants. She grabbed Dean’s hand and cupped it in both of hers over her crotch so he could feel the outline underneath. 

His eyes flew to her face but he didn’t recoil. Just stared, puzzled. 

She relinquished his hand, sat back demurely. “I was a boy at my last school. When I started dressing like a girl, I, uh, got into trouble. I don’t want to talk about it, but, uh, we moved here, so I could be a girl.” 

“Whoa.” He was clearly having trouble processing this. “You’re a girl.” 

“Yes,” she said. 

“But you’ve got-” 

“A dick, yes. I hate it.” 

Dean looked down. “Sorry to hear that.” 

She shrugged. “I’ll get it fixed someday. Right now, it’s a liability.” 

“How so?” 

“When they beat the shit out of me and I almost die.” 

Anger overcame Dean. “Joanna, anyone ever tries anything like that, I’ll, I’ll rip their fucking lungs out!” 

She smiled. “My hero.” She bent down, but she pulled up short. “Can I kiss you?” 

He didn’t answer, just chased her lips. They kissed deeply, Heaven knows how long. 

It was Dean who broke the kiss. “I’m sorry, babe.”

“What?” she started. 

He couldn’t look her in the eye so he stared at her chin instead. _Not a hair,_ he thought absently. “I can’t stop thinking about your, um, about your body. Will you- Would you hate me if I told you I, I wanted to touch you?”

She thought a moment, seeming to read his face. “Yeah, okay.” She stood up, peeled off her layers of armor. Leggings. Boxer briefs. Flowery cotton panties. “Sorry, I’m a little paranoid.” 

Dean watched breathless. “’S okay.”

He slipped off the couch to kneel down in front of her, between her legs. He spent a moment just looking, his hands resting somewhat anxiously on her thighs. He’d never seen another dick up close. Well, except changing Sammy’s diapers, but that’s totally different. And he’d seen plenty of porn cocks. But this, this was all new. When he finally dared to touch, it was to slide a curious finger from the cleft down the shaft. She shivered.

“Was that a good shiver or a bad shiver?”

“I like that.”

He did it again and returned her shy smile. “You should sit down,” escorting her back to the sofa. “Comfy?” he asks.

She nods. “’M okay. I trust you.”

Dean felt a thrill, as much from her words as from the prospect before him. Not trying to be seductive at first; just touching. He gripped her, but it felt awkward, like he was on the wrong side. He touched the tip with his thumb, rubbed it softly. He scooped up her balls in his other hand, cupped them lightly, ran his thumb along the seam. His face pushed forward, but he stopped himself before his lips could make contact. He glanced up; her eyes were half-closed, glazed and eager, all the encouragement he needed. He kissed the base of her shaft. Let his tongue trail upwards, licking the cleft, mouthing experimentally at the head. He laid a gentle kiss on the very tip, and when he happened to lick his lips, he got his first taste of her. He swiped his tongue across the opening. Opened his mouth over the head, teeth lightly scraping just below the rounded edges where they meet the shaft. He tried to remember all the little things she had done to drive him so crazy only minutes before. He wanted to feel her coming undone under his hands, wanted to tear her down, rattle her apart, wanted her to feel as blissful as she had made him. 

 

~~~

 

“Are you aware that you record kills and conquests exactly the same way?”

“Hmm?”

“I said, ‘Are you aware that you record kills and conquests exactly the same way?’”

Dean sat up, blinked, shook the memory away. “No, I don’t. They’re written in two different colors of ink.”

“You’re a pig.”

“No, I’m- well yes, but that’s not why I-”

“What did you write about me?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

“No really, nothing. I haven’t written a word, haven’t even peeked inside, since, uh.” His face falls and he goes quiet. “Since they left me,” he mumbles.

“…Don’t tell me this is some messed-up version of a family photo album.”

Dean reaches across, gently closes the book, and removes it from Ty’s lap. 

“You have issues.”

“Yup. And I’ll deal with them later.”

 

~~~

 

Dean needs his skin to stop crawling. Like, yesterday. 

His right hand hurts where he burnt it on the coffee pot; his left hand hurts where he scalded it when he bobbled the coffee pot. He’s got a crick in his neck from sleeping wrong, his back hurts from yesterday’s sparring, _and why the fuck are there gnats in my face at nine o’clock in the morning on the coldest day of the season?_

“Fuck this shit.” 

Placidly staring into the fire, Ty rouses himself enough to ask absentmindedly, “What did you say?” 

Dean jumps up, paces, digs a damaged fist into his fragile palm. Fuck the pain. He’s silent for so long that Ty turns around, looking for him. He clearly doesn’t like what he sees, but Dean’s too far gone to care.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Dean lies. “I’m awesome. Hey, you know what we should do? We should find a titty bar.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

The retort hangs heavily. Slowly, Ty asks, “What would I do at a, uh, titty bar?”

“What else?”

“Except that’s not really my thing, Dean. Don’t know if you noticed, but I prefer-”

“Fuck,” Dean mutters. “Forget it. I don’t, I just, fuck it.” He scratches an impatient hand across his scalp and snags on the root of an overgrown cornrow. “Ow! Goddammit!” he shouts as he yanks his hand free.

“Here, let me help.”

“No. Just…”

He trails off, stares at Ty for another moment before striding angrily towards the gate.

“Where are you going?” 

“Nowhere,” Dean snaps.

“You okay?”

Dean says nothing, but he tosses a glare over his shoulder before throwing the gate open. He stalks out, doesn’t bother to close the gate behind him. Just walks. 

_Two months tomorrow. It’ll be two months since, since- fuck, two months since they left me. Not a phone call, not a text, nothing for two months. And where the hell are they now? Dead? Maybe. Not here, that’s for fucking sure._

_But is that the real problem? Shut up. No. Shut up. This has nothing to do with_ that. _This is about Dad abandoning me._ Dean shudders. _Sammy. He must be having so much fun. Maybe he’s getting up right now, getting ready for an early class. Probably waking up next to some gorgeous, brilliant girl. Not in a shitty motel or curled against the door of an ancient rattletrap, with nothing to look at but some weird stain on the ceiling and his ugly brother in the next bed and a father who pisses him off more often than not. He’s happy, probably, stimulated in so many new and exciting ways. Geek._

_Of course he’s happy! He’s out. Lucky sonofabitch. He’s not thinking about how long it’s been since he held a knife to the throat of a witch, or how long it’s been since he had to search a ratty motel room for hexbags so he didn’t bleed out from the eyeballs in the night. He doesn’t think about it._

_(Oh shit, I miss it. No. No, Ty’s not ready. Or I’d already have a case in hand.)_

_God, does Sam even keep a salt line on the windowsill anymore? Is he safe? What if something were to track him down? What if something finds him and I’m not there to save him? Oh god, how would I know?_

_Shut up, Dean. He’s fine. Dad taught him everything he knows. He’s fine. Of course he’s fine. Oh Sammy._

_For that matter, what am I doing here? I can’t teach Ty. I’ll get him killed if I send him out there. He’s got no right to be a hunter. No fire, no drive; he’ll wuss out or fail to take it seriously or, Jesus Christ, he’ll think that the shit on TV is correct. Something will get the jump on him and he’ll die in an alley. Worse, he’ll die in my arms, that beautiful stupid bastard; he’ll die with this big warm eyes looking up at me, judging me, blaming me for killing him. And then what? I’m back where I was two months ago, ready to shoot myself. Because I can’t, I can’t send him out there to die. They all die. He’s already dead, just sharing my campsite._

_Ty, I’ve killed you. I’m so sorry._

Dean sinks to his knees. “I can’t,” he mutters. “I’ll walk away. He deserves better.”

 

~~~

 

When Ty finds him, he’s sprawled in a scrubby pasture, staring up into the canopy of one straggly old tree, contemplating the branches and staring at nothing.

“Hey.”

Dean’s expression doesn’t change, but he replies. “Hey yourself.”

“You okay?”

“I look okay?”

“No,” Ty admits. “You look like you’ve been crying.”

“I don’t cry.”

_Bullshit._ “You look like hell.”

Impassively, “Well, I push away everyone that matters and I kill anyone who gets close, so good, maybe I deserve it.”

Ty squats down by Dean’s head. “You don’t.”

Dean snorts. “You’re only not dead because I haven’t taken you on the road yet. Your time will come.”

“Dean.” Ty sits down, shimmies his lap under Dean’s head, holds his cheeks as he talks. “I don’t understand your world. It’s absolutely fucking insane. You talk about ghosts and werewolves like they’re normal things.” 

Dean opens his mouth to protest. 

“I know; to you, they are. And I believe you.” He smooths a finger under Dean’s cheekbone. “Really, Dean. I’m taking the lessons to heart, I promise. It’s not real yet, but it is. I won’t die…”

“You say that now,” his voice cracking.

“And neither will Sam,” Ty nudges, and Dean unleashes the flood. “Two months, right?”

Dean can only nod.

“Is it Sam?” The shake of Dean’s head is nearly imperceptible. Oh. “It’s me.” 

And this time, Dean just rolls his face into the side of Ty’s leg and clings with both hands.

“I’m just a hook-up that won’t leave.”

From the crook of Ty’s knee comes a strangled cry. “No,” says the voice. “Yes,” says the voice, “I hate you.”

“Too bad,” Ty whispers. “I got your number.” Ty sits in silence for some minutes, stroking Dean’s shoulder. 

“Ty?”

“Yes, Dean?”

“I can’t just sit here, week after week, playing house with someone I can’t- someone I shouldn’t-” He grunts. “Goddammit.”

“Because I’m black or because I’m gay?” he intuits.

“Fuck. Because you’re a _child_.”

Ty blinks but does not rise to the bait. Instead, he asks, “Do you remember- it was a while ago- do you remember telling me about Joanna?”

Dean stills. “Yeah,” he drawls. 

“You said that it was easier to take it slow. Less pressure.”

“Yeah.”

Ty touches Dean’s face, tilts it towards him. “Do you want that?”

“I don’t know. No. Maybe. This is just a little too, uh, it’s a little too permanent. You and me…” He trails off.

“Because it feels like a relationship.”

Dean swallows hard and says nothing.

“Okay, no problem.” Ty gives him a cheerless smile. “Hands off,” as he tries to extricate himself from Dean’s grasp. 

“No!” He grips tighter. “No. Please. I want you to touch me. I need it. I need to be touched,” he bleats. “Just-” He stops, breathes deeply. “Yeah. We take it slow.”

“I can still do your hair,” he offers, reaching for a tired braid. He works the rubber band off, and Dean almost purrs as Ty’s fingers comb through the plait, scratching at his scalp to relieve the pins and needles. One by one, the cornrows come out, until Dean is a puddle of happiness in Ty’s lap.

“This is good,” he murmurs.

“Yeah. We take it slow.”

“Yeah.” Dean rolls his head a little drunkenly to look up at Ty, a broad grin smeared across his face. “And tomorrow we start hunting.”


	6. Striking Out

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Training's over.

The letter reads: “Hey bro, sorry to bug you, but a friend of mine is looking to get into the business. Could you put together a couple of headshots for him? He's performing under the name Dante Smith. You can send it to the PO box. Give me a shout when you get this. D”

"Headshots?" Ty asks.

"Don't worry, he'll understand. Do you have the pictures from the photo booth?”

Ty makes a frustrated noise in his throat. “No, I left them in my bag in the trunk. I’ll go grab them.” Dean fishes out his keys while Ty drags his boots on. 

He’s taking his sweet time finding the pics, and Dean says as much.

“Hold your horses, I’m getting us a snack,” Ty hollers.

"Grab the papers from the front seat, too, would ya?"

Handing him the stack of newsprint through the flap, Ty chuckles. "I will never get over the fact that you call tabloids 'the papers,' like they're legitimate news sources." He hands over the sandwiches, too, and kicks off his boots before crawling in. Heaven forbid he track dirt into a goddamn tent.

"To a hunter, they are. I mean, where else are you gonna get a straight scoop about the freaky shit that really goes on?"

"So what are we looking for?" he asks, grabbing the next rag from the pile.

Dean laughs. "You'll know it when you see it."

They sit opposite one another, flipping the pages in silence. Occasionally, Ty reads a headline aloud. "Florida man marries a crocodile?"

Dean rolls his eyes and sighs sarcastically, "Florida! No, not it."

"Body of Michigan teen found between wing-shaped scorch marks. Cult activity suspected.”

"Cult activity?" Dean thinks a moment. "That could mean demons. But what would wings have to do with anything?" He drums his fingers on his thigh. "Save it, but uh, I'm not so sure it's our kind of thing." A few minutes later, Dean taps his foot against Ty's. "Here we go: a rash of incidents in Ohio involving owls flying through open windows and attacking the occupants. All teenagers, all dead within a week."

"They know each other?"

"Hard to say. The paper lists a different town for each one. No, scratch that. Three of them go- went- to the same school."

"What do you think it is?"

Dean shrugs.

"An owl could be a familiar,” Ty guesses. 

"A familiar?” 

“Witches always have an animal spirit to do their bidding: a black cat or an owl or a toad.”

“Yeah? Where’d you hear that?”

Ty frowns. “I don’t know. Stories, I guess. All the Halloween decorations, you always see a witch with an animal around her." He pulls a face. "Everyone knows that.”

“Don’t believe everything you read in a Hallmark card. Grain of salt, dude,” Dean scoffs. But he considers it. He stretches out, pillows his head on his hands. “Or maybe a grain of truth. A witch, huh. I hate witches.”

"Are they ... dangerous?"

Dean sits up, glares at Ty. "Everything is dangerous. Ghosts, vamps, demons, they're all dangerous." He sneers unconsciously. "But give a human a little power." He glances over towards Ty, but won't meet his eyes. "I tell ya, supercharged humans scare the bejesus out of me. It's like, we should know better than to make deals with the monsters. And witches are the fucking worst."

Ty's eyes are huge. "Can we stop them?"

"Well yeah, I mean, you've seen the journal. It depends on the witch, but yeah, they can always be stopped, if you figure it out in time."

"Kill it before it kills you, you mean."

Dean grimaces, nods. "That's pretty much the name of the game. Translate it into Latin, put it on the family crest." He sighs, pulls himself upright. "But. We don't know for sure what 's really going on in Centerville." He shows Ty his most charming, confident, bullshit grin and adds, "But we'll figure it out!"

~~~

It's bittersweet, of course, striking camp. After all, this is the first time in two months that they've left without knowing if they'd both be back.

Hmm.

Dean keeps that thought to himself for the moment.

They take down the tent and the clothesline, smother the fire, stack the fire pit stones against the fence. Their activities startle their friendly neighborhood fox, who scurries out towards the pasture. They have to take out and repack a bunch of weapons before they can store the tent and sleeping bags in the trunk, but that doesn't take too long. Most of the food and dry goods stay on the back seat or on the rear floorboards, tucked innocuously to one side. Nope, definitely not living out of this vehicle, nosiree.

On the road, they work on their cover: college newspaper journalists, drawn into the story because they knew one of the victims, one Trent Lovingfoss. He's the oddball, the outlier, the only one that doesn't fit the pattern. He lived next door to the first vic, yet went to a different school, Alter in Dayton. Having seen his picture, Dean describes him as goth, the loser in black clothes and too much eyeliner, probably listens to Depeche Mode and the Cure, or whatever the equivalent is these days. Not that Dean can relate. Nope, definitely never envied the dishwater suburban values that made the look so menacing, like staring into the face of teenage angst and rebellion was to gaze upon Hell itself. Okay, maybe sometimes he thought about it, donning studded leather cuffs and wicked black eyes, or even just dyeing his hair black. Hell, he would have settled for blasting some "faggy" devil music, but just the thought of what Dad would say...

 _Dangerous road, Dean_ he thinks, pulling himself back to the present.

The other 4 vics seem more typical: not the popular kids, but not cliquey, either. Normal. An even mix of guys and girls, all juniors in high school. Both girls and the redhead's boyfriend go to Centerville, and the other boy is from a neighboring district. From what Dean and Ty can gather, he knew only his girlfriend and Trent, but not the other kids.

"First thing we do is visit the families," Dean explains, as they cross the state line. "We condole with them, gain their trust, and wait for them to start talking. When they hesitate, you shut the fuck up, because they're about to spill the real story."

"The real story?"

"The real story." Dean smiles, an oddly wistful thing, and continues. "Like, they've got the story they believe, and then there's the truth. No one ever wants to tell the truth, the real thing they saw with their fucking eyes, because of course, that kind of thing couldn't really happen, right? They saw it, whatever it was, but they can’t believe it. And that's what we need to know about. That's how we figure out what's going on. Whatever it is we need to gank is hidden in that chunk of the story that's so unbelievable, they literally can't trust their own eyes."

Ty nods.

~~~

The woman pauses. “Do you know what a Wee-ja is?”

Dean looks puzzled, glances at Ty and finds a mirror for his expression. They are in the living room of the first victim’s house, and Mrs. Wilkins is studying the floral pattern of the sofa arm beside Dean. “I’m sorry?” he asks.

“Wee-ja. O-u-i-j-a. The neighbor kid had a box that said Wee-ja, and it looked like some kind of devil game.”

The guys are nodding. “A spirit board,” Dean blurts.

Mrs. Wilkins does not find this clarification comforting. “Spirits?”

Dean tries to laugh it off. “Harmless. This was a slumber party, right?”

“Yes, Anya wanted a boy-girl sleepover for her seventeenth. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but her _father,_ ” she spits. 

“That was almost two weeks ago, though,” Ty hints, picking up the thread.

“Yes. That boy brought something into this house.”

“Trent. He and Anya spend a lot of time together?”

Mrs. Wilkins shakes her head. “Hardly ever. Why?”

“Well, we’d heard him talk about her,” Dean answers.

“And her boyfriend,” Ty interjects. Dean shoots him a funny look; Ty waves him off. _I got this,_ he seems to say. “He goes to another school.”

“Well, yes, Jake and Anya used to be in all the same classes, since Kindergarten, until his parents – Clara and Bob, they’ve been on the PTA with me forever – they pulled him out of Centerville and enrolled him in the high school in his grandmother’s district. That was about a year ago. And these two missed each other so much. That’s when they started dating, after he left the school. It was really very sweet,” she barely finishes through tears. “I’m sorry, it’s still so fresh. It’s only been a week, and I can’t-” She sniffs and clears her throat, clutching at a tissue. “I’m sorry. You boys only stopped by to be polite, and I’m keeping you.”

“No, ma’am, it’s fine. Actually, we had another question.” Ty looks to Dean for reassurance before he continues. “It’s just that, Mrs. Lovingfoss-”

“Mrs. Jones; Lovingfoss is her ex’s name.”

“R-right,” he stammers. 

Dean can’t see Ty’s cheeks turning pink, but he knows that head-duck well enough to imagine the warmth under his skin. Dean smiles, because it’s a-fucking-dorable; he just hopes the born-again on the other couch doesn’t notice.

“Mrs. Jones told us that something attacked Trent through his bedroom window, and I wondered if maybe-”

“It was an owl.”

“Um. An owl?”

“Of course. What else would it have been?”

Dean puts his hand on Ty’s arm. The touch says, _Stop talking._

He flicks his eyes at Dean, and they both still. They turn their attention back to Anya’s mother and wait.

“But.” She halts again.

Ty shakes his head, almost imperceptibly, frowning as if he’s surprised that she speaks again. He leans forward.

 _Sneaky bastard!_ Dean smirks. _He’s even better than Sam._

“But I’m not sure. It might have been-” She stops, incredulous.

“Might have been what?” Softly, gently, coaxing the story from her.

“It looked human. But I’m sure it was an owl. Do owls have white, blank eyes?”

Ty shook his head, chanced a peek at Dean. “I’m not sure, ma’am.”

She’ll say nothing further on the subject, so Dean breaks the silence. “I’m sorry, but uh, it’s time we got back. To the school.”

Ty checks his watch. “Right. Um. Thank you, Mrs. Wilkins. And really, we’re so sorry to hear about Anya. If there’s anything we can do.” He produces a scrap of paper with Dean’s cell written on it.

“Oh yes, thank you boys, you’re too good. Let me get you a few more cookies for the road.”

~~~

“Shouldn’t we have checked for hex bags?” Ty asks, reaching for his seatbelt.

Dean has a peanut butter blossom crammed in his mouth. “No point,” he mumbles. 

“Finish chewing, you pig.”

He swallows. “We didn’t find any in Trent’s room; we’re not gonna find any here. It’s not a witch.”

“How can you tell?”

He slides the key into the ignition and pauses without cranking it. “I don’t know. Just a hunch. Something about the way she saw an owl but also a human. That sound like the, uh, whaddyacallem?”

“Familiars.”

“That sound like a familiar to you?”

“I don’t know. Probably not.”

“Blank eyes. She said blank eyes, and she said it looked human. I think it’s a demon. Maybe not an honest-to-god Hell demon, but something.” Dean’s eyes shift out of focus for a moment. When he snaps back to reality, he asks, “What were you driving at?”

“When?”

“You had a hunch. In there. When you asked about the boyfriend?” 

“Oh. I think Trent and Anya’s boyfriend were together.”

“What? Why?”

“Trent’s not- wasn’t- straight.” Ty hesitates. “There were a ton of clues in his room, you must have noticed.”

Dean frowns and shakes his head. “My gaydar’s in the shop,” he deadpans, starting the car and pulling away from the curb. 

“Clearly. They didn’t start dating until he mysteriously switched to a new school. If his parents are anything like Anya’s mom, and they probably are, my money’s on them keeping him away from an offensive influence. Like a boyfriend. And neither Trent’s parents nor Anya’s mom ever saw much of the neighbor kid, but they all knew Jake pretty well.”

“Huh.” Dean turns to beam at Ty. “Nice work! So what’s Jake’s connection here? He’s not the source of the problem if he’s dead, too.”

“No.” 

They drive in silence, considering their next move.

~~~

The phone call from Mrs. Wilkins comes three hours later, not long after nightfall.

“You have to help us! It attacked Melissa, too! It’s going to kill my younger daughter!”


	7. The Devil You Know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time is running out, and a little sympathy goes a long way.

Ty sits down beside Anya’s little sister on the rumpled pink bedspread and takes her hand. “Melissa, I need you to tell me what happened.”

“An owl flew in the window. It … slashed at me. It screeched at me and it attacked me with its claws.”

“Did it-” he lowers his voice, “did it say anything to you?”

“It was an owl!” she shrieks. “It couldn’t have-” A gasp and, “Oh shit.”

Across the room, Dean nods surreptitiously.

“I don’t know,” she continues. “There weren’t actual words, I think. More like ideas.”

“Go on,” Ty murmurs.

Melissa Wilkins shakes her head. “Something about joining her. No, her joining me? She wanted me for something, but I don’t know. She wanted to help me. She would give me … something.” She falters, suddenly aware of her audience. 

“Something?” Dean asks.

She shakes her head again. “I don’t know,” she lies. “She wanted to give me something, and in exchange she had to-” At this, Melissa squeezes her eyes tightly and refuses to say another word. 

Ty leans in close, reassuring but firm. “Melissa, if you can’t tell us what she said, what she offered you, we can’t begin to help you.” 

“I know, but it’s- it’s too personal. It’s embarrassing,” she hisses.

“Is there anyone you can tell? Someone you can trust to relay it to us?”

Melissa eyes Dean, though she addresses Ty. “Maybe if it was just, um, us?”

Following her gaze, Ty catches Dean’s attention and shoos him out of the room.

He points at his chest, mouths, “Me?”

Ty nods, gives him a two-finger gesture to get to stepping. 

Dean rolls his eyes and exits the room without further protest.

As soon as the door closes, Melissa asks, “Are you gay?”

“Where the hell did that come from?”

“I mean, you and he are-”

He shrugs. “Kinda, but why?”

“She told me she had to have sex with me.”

Ty blinks. “The owl?”

“Yes,” Melissa whispers.

“Um. Okay, why?”

“Something about sealing the deal.”

“What deal?”

She takes a deep breath before continuing. Covers her eyes with her hands and doubles over so she can’t see Ty’s face and he can’t see hers. “We all made deals. Or tried to. She got in our heads when we were doing the Ouija. No one knew the others were talking to her, but that’s why they’re dead! I’m sure of it.” She’s sobbing now. “I don’t know what they wished for, but none of it was worth it. If they were all as stupid as me, then they wasted their lives on stupid, stupid wishes.”

Ty has a hand on her back, and now he gently brushes it up and down her spine, soothing and shushing. “What else can you tell me?”

She pushes out a breath. “I can guess that Trent and Jake asked for each other. I don’t know what Anya would want. Probably had to do with school. She was always very nervous about her grades and getting into a good college. That kind of thing. Or maybe she had a crush on someone, I don’t know. We didn’t really talk about stuff like that. Brittany and Natasha and Nacho, I barely know. Knew.”

“And you? What did you ask for?”

Melissa pauses. “I wasn’t playing, not really, until I saw Natasha run out of the room crying. And that’s when Anya told me to take her place.” She stands up and runs across the room for the box of tissues on her desk. She jumps back on the bed and curls herself into a ball around her pillow, eyes fixed on Ty near the foot of the bed. She shivers. “As soon as I put my hands on the pointer, I heard whispering. And no one else was talking. I looked them all in the face, and they all had these hundred-yard stares, like they were listening. She sounded … reasonable. She sounded wise and calm and just fucking reasonable. She made my skin crawl, but I also trusted her completely and I wanted to please her.” 

Ty nods for her to continue.

“I let her-” but she’s cut off by a sharp gasp. Her eyes widen, then shut tight, and she starts to shake, seize. 

“Dean!” Ty calls for help.

He bursts through the door, sees the girl in convulsions. “I’ll get the mother.”

Ty tries to remember what to do with a seizure. His mind’s a blank, and he babbles, “It’s okay, Melissa. You’re fine. Come back. Just having a friendly talk. Melissa? You’re okay. Please, just, um.”

She comes around as Ty hears two sets of footsteps thundering up the stairs. “What happened?”

“Shh, it’s okay, Melissa, we were talking and you blacked out for a minute. You’re okay. Look, Dean and I are going to take off now.” He makes a show of placing a slip of paper on her dresser. “This is my number. Call me if you want to talk about it, okay?”

She nods and allows her mother to scoop her up and cradle her. “Thank you, Ty.”

~~~

Sometime after 2 am, Ty gets a text: “Her name is Lilith and she gave me revenge.”

~~~

First thing that morning, they’re waiting out front of the public library, inhaling doughnuts and strong coffee from the bakery across the street. When the staff shows up, Dean charms the ladies with smiles and pastries, and gains access to a cache of documents about a local owl legend. Meanwhile, Ty manages to hack his way into the victims' LiveJournal accounts, in addition to a few select school records, just to confirm his hunch on Trent and Jake. 

"She was being bullied online. She didn't mention that." Ty thrusts a printout into Dean's hand.

"'She told me she'd take care of it if I said yes,'" Dean reads. "'So I said yes. I'm not sure what I said yes to, but I find out in two weeks.' Son of a bitch."

Ty just nods. "That was two weeks ago today. The night of the slumber party. And the only reference to any kind of negotiation. Still, the attack last night is consistent with the other deaths, in that they were attacked within a week of their death, and here we have a rendezvous already planned."

"So it's a deal with the devil to stop the bullies. Do we have names?"

"Usernames, yes, but nothing to tie them to people."

"Okay, so if you could access her computer, maybe you could-"

"Or we ask her what she knows."

Dean frowns and shakes his head. "That'll never work. The direct route just leads to more lies. "

"We have to try something. She has nine hours at most before her IOU comes due. And she trusts me."

~~~

**outofnarnia666:** okay, so I have a question for you  
 **sickayershiit13579:** what's up?  
 **outofnarnia666:** I know you don't know me for shit, but ...   
**outofnarnia666:** No I can't, nvm  
 **sickayershiit13579:** come on we've been friends for hours! I told you about my sister's abortion.  
 **outofnarnia666:** Which you weren’t supposed to know about   
**sickayershiit13579:** and you know about the owl  
 **outofnarnia666:** or talk about  
 **outofnarnia666:** that’s it, that’s what it’s about!  
 **outofnarnia666:** my question is: do you know who was behind the usernames?  
 **sickayershiit13579:** what usernames?  
 **outofnarnia666:** …  
 **outofnarnia666:** you know what I’m talking about, the bullies.  
 _ **sickayershiit13579** has disconnected._

~~~

“Motherfuck.”

“What?” Dean asks without looking up from the copier.

“She disconnected without answering the question.”

“Told ya.”

~~~

When Dean comes back to the table, his eyes are shining and he’s wearing a broad grin. "Local legend has it, two hundred years ago this month, a girl by the name of Elizabeth Calders was attacked by an owl through her bedroom window, same as these kids. Over the next week, there's a spate of baby abductions, fifty-mile radius. A couple of the corpses turn up, drained of blood, but the rest, uh, six total, they just vanish."

"Babies?"

Dean holds up a finger. "But get this: when news of the first bloodless baby gets out, old man Calders finally gets around to reporting his daughter missing." He hands Ty a photocopy from his sheaf of papers. "She was troubled, he said. Said she'd run away before, and always came home without a fuss. This time, though-"

"'She weren't my little Eliza ... a white-eyed demon ... called herself Lilith.'" Ty paused. "Lilith was on my list today. Jewish folklore. She was an abomination or something, had an affair with an archangel." He taps the name Lilith into the search engine and points to the screen. "First wife of Adam. Before Eve. Oh and guess how Lilith translates?"

Dean shrugs.

“Screech owl!”

“Shit.” Dean reads over his shoulder. "Maybe Farmer Calders wasn't exaggerating. A demon named Lilith possessing young girls?"

"We have to talk to Melissa, now!"

Dean presses a hand to Ty’s upper arm. "Hold your horses, there, babe. We're gonna need one more thing before we tackle this thing. We gotta know how to stop it."

~~~

The door opens and Dean is asking to speak to Melissa, when the words die on his lips. Mrs. Wilkins' face is swollen and red. She's been crying, yes, but bludgeoned on the left cheek as well. A bruise blooms over her eye, and a weeping cut seeps blood down her neck and onto her lacey collar. She's stunned, and Dean knows that look too well. He takes her arm and leads her back inside, settles her on the floral couch. Without loosing her hand, he calls to Ty. "Put some water on to boil and bring me ice. Then find hand towels, rags, whatever, something soft and absorbent. Check the medicine cabinets for ointment."

"Dean, we don't have time to-"

"Goddammit, Ty,” he almost shouts, “she's gonna die if we don't do something! Go!"

Ty hurries off, and Dean turns his attention to the injured woman. Speaking softly to her, Dean strokes her hand and whispers reassurances. "You're safe, we got you, you're okay, just a little scrape, we’ll get you patched up. Here. (Thanks, Ty.) Ice for the sore spot," he says, holding the towel-wrapped cold pack to her cheek.

"My daughter..."

"Shhh, we'll take care of it, we’ll get her back. She left?"

The woman nods.

"That wasn't her, not really, but we'll get her back. Okay? Your job is to be well when she comes home.” Dean sees Ty coming around the corner. “Mrs. Wilkins, is there tea here? Would you like a cup of tea? Something hot and soothing?”

“Cabinet, over the microwave, left-hand side.”

Dean nods at Ty and he scurries back to the kitchen, plops a tea bag into a mug and pours water over it. Handing it off to Dean, he moves to put more hot water and a face towel into a small bowl and carries that to the living room as well. 

“Thank you,” Dean mouths, as Ty squeezes excess water from the towel and presses it into Dean’s hand. Dean swabs the wound, cleans her face and neck, wets and wrings a clean towel to rest on her swollen eye. “It’s not ideal, but it will feel good,” and he slathers antibiotic ointment on the wide cut on her face. 

The woman barely stirs as he labors, but her face looks calmer and she’s breathing easy. 

“Good, good, feel that warmth. You’re okay. You’re okay,” Dean soothes. “Look, we have to go if we’re going to bring Melissa back. And we will. Will you promise to lie down and not worry?”

She’s got her tea in hand now, and she nods gingerly. “Thank you. Thank you, Dean. Ty. Thank you for everything.”

~~~

The nearest hospital is three miles down the road on the left. They follow the signs to maternity and find chaos. Fortunately, they haven’t lost the demon; she is barricaded within the locked ward. Dean tosses Ty a spray can. “Kill the cameras.” With his own spray can, he draws a circle and a five-pointed star. A few squiggly symbols between the points, and he is staring at his very own devil’s trap. “Sure hope this works,” he muses. Aloud, he calls, “Come out, Lilith. We have a juicy baby here for you, ya bitch.” He picks the lock. Nothing changes; the door is still secure. He shoots the automatic door keypad and crashes through the door with a too-hard nudge. He changes position silently, hoping to disguise his exact location. He finds her in the nursery, crouched over a wheeled crib. He fires a round at her head, hoping against hope that she’ll drop easy. No such luck. “Hey, you!” He shouts. “You chicken? Afraid to find out what a real man tastes like?”

The demon’s eyes flash white and she smiles into the bait. “Not a chance, sweetie. Baby human is so delectable, though. Like your veal. Vile stuff, veal.”

“Try me.”

“Maybe I will,” arrogant curiosity getting the better of her. She snatches up the child beneath her, a plump little sausage, swaddled in a blue blanket with a pink and blue cap, and rushes Dean, trying to knock him off-balance. The dance continues for several passes, before Dean’s sprinting full-tilt towards the ward doors. He crosses through the devil’s trap, but the white-eyed demon is not so lucky. Nor so smart, it would seem.

“Melissa,” Dean begs. “This is not you. You have to fight. Cast her off.”

Lilith just laughs. “It doesn’t work that way, Dean.”

“Yeah well, you don’t work that way.” 

“What are you going to do with me, Dean? Keep me trapped here until the baby dies of old age?”

“What do you want with Melissa?”

“Can’t a girl seduce young, hot bodies just for fun? You of all people should be able to appreciate that.”

Dean scowls. “What do you want with the girl?” he rasps.

“Absolutely nothing,” the demon smirks flippantly. “This is a practice run. To keep from getting rusty.”

“Practice for what?”

“Never you mind your pretty head.” She tilts her head and grins. “She wants this, you know. She loves me for rescuing her. She wants me to be with her. She wants me inside of her,” the words oozing filthily. “And doesn’t that make it okay?”

Dean raises his weapon and aims for the demon’s dead white eyes, disguising a flinch as her words hit home. He can hear Ty take in a sharp breath from somewhere on his left. What a time for him to return. “You’re possessing her. How is that a rescue?”

“By destroying her enemies. The ‘bullies.’ Brittany, Nacho. Anya.” Lilith hums in satisfaction. “I especially loved carving her up. She drives her sister to the brink of suicide, then tries to sell out her little boy toy and his friend.” With a false pout, she reflects, “Poor dears only wanted to be together forever; I gave them eternity.”

Instead of responding, he pulls a long and beaded chain from his pocket and begins to chant. “I adjure you, ancient serpent, to depart. Depart, transgressor. Depart, seducer, full of lies and cunning, foe of virtue, persecutor of the innocent. Give place, abominable creature, give way, you monster.”

As the demon writhes and grimaces in thrall to the exorcism spell, Ty takes a chance. He enters the devil’s trap and frees the baby from Lilith’s grip. He backs well clear, holding the infant safe. 

“She wants me, Dean,” the demon shrieks. “She’ll die without me. Kill her!”

Dean hears a noise behind him, the clatter of the stairs door slamming open. His voice climbs.

“Tremble and flee before whom the denizens of hell cower, before the Cherubim and Seraphim who praise with unending cries as they sing. For the power of Christ compels you-”

Black smoke bubbles from the teenager’s body and roils as a dark fog at her feet. She collapses as the smoke screams. Her arm falls awkwardly across the outer circle, effectively breaking the trap, and the smoke shoots away, racing his words back to Hell before the demonic spirit can be utterly destroyed.

He sinks to his knees, staring at Melissa’s unconscious form and wondering if there’s any chance she’ll survive having been Lilith’s meatsuit. “Dammit,” he whispers. 

“Dean?”

His eyes widen. He’s on his feet and ramrod straight in a second. “Dad!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: Exorcism script abridged and adapted from [Catholic Online](http://www.catholic.org/prayers/prayer.php?p=683)


	8. Father of the Year

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It turns out that Dean has some pretty serious hang-ups about his old man...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for John Winchester wank... If you *like* John, or just don't think he did a bad job raising his boys, you probably don't want to read this chapter... It's safe to say that he does not come off as terribly sympathetic...
> 
> Warning also for two in-context slurs: the n-word and the f-word... Please don't make me spell them out again...

Ty can tell he’s not going to like the scruffy, stocky white man that Dean calls “Dad.” He doesn’t like the way Dean stands taller, straighter, but without an ounce of pride to accompany the military bearing. He doesn’t like that the first thing he says to his son, whom he left in a shambles, is, “What the fuck did you do to your hair? You look like a-” And Ty definitely does not appreciate that he would have said it, he would have finished his fucking racist thought, if Ty had not cleared his throat at that moment, drawn attention to himself.

He does not like the look of embarrassment (or is that fear?) in Dean’s eyes when his father turns to face the black teenager cradling a white baby. There’s a coldness there, too, to accompany the small shake of the head: “deny, deny, deny.”

“Who’s this, Dean?” his father asks.

“Oh uh.” His voice goes flat as he introduces them. “Dad, this is Ty; Ty, meet my dad, John Winchester.” Emotion creeps back in as he adds, “Best hunter in the country.”

Neither Ty nor John makes any motion to seal the acquaintance with a handshake.

“I don’t work with other hunters, Dean.”

“He’s not, Dad, he-” Dean drops his voice conspiratorially, but not so low that Ty can’t hear. “I couldn’t save them, I couldn’t save his parents, but he escaped. He had nowhere to go, and he was furious, wanted revenge. He’s like us, Dad.”

At least he has the good graces to lie for him, rather than sell him down the river.

“I’ve taught him everything he knows,” he continues, “and he’s _good_. Think how much better he’ll be after a few hunts with you, Dad!” Dean’s smiling. But Ty can see it for what it is: a plea. A desperate fucking plea. Love me, Daddy; pay attention to me. He’d gotten over that bullshit years ago, and clearly Dean never did. Interesting. Well, this is gonna be so much fucking fun.

“I don’t know, Dean.”

“Please, Dad,” like he’s negotiating to keep a goddamn stray puppy. He glances towards Ty, with a sly smile just for him. “He’s never let me down yet.” 

Ty doesn’t like what John’s presence does to Dean. The Dean he’s come to know wouldn’t have abandoned Melissa in that hospital ward. Not after the compassion he showed just hours ago. Ty says as much in the car, following John back to some abandoned house he’s crashing.

“For fuck’s sake, Dean, you gave the woman fucking tea!”

He shakes his head once. “Like Dad said, we don’t know if she’s going to live. Who’m I to argue? I can’t take her to Mrs. Wilkins just so she can watch her die.”

“No? But you can leave her handcuffed to a hospital bed? Dean, she was- she was not herself. And no one will ever believe that she was possessed. If they don’t lock her in jail, they’ll toss her in the fucking loony bin.” He reaches for Dean’s hand. “We have an obligation-”

Dean flinches, pulls his hand away so abruptly, he’s not really sure where to put it. It hovers against his chest for a moment before settling on the steering wheel. Dean shakes his head again. “Look, Ty, I appreciate what you’re trying to do,” from between gritted teeth. “Really. But we couldn’t save her. And we can’t do anything about it now.”

“I just wish you weren’t so flip about it,” he mumbles.

“I’m flip? I’m flip! Dude, we could have saved her, we could have-” His jaw goes rigid and he can’t speak around the rage or the fear or the plain basic sadness he’s swallowing back. “Just, fuck it. Forget it.” He jabs the radio to kill Ty’s country station. “It’s over.”

Ty’s pretty sure Dean’s not still talking about the hunt. 

They say nothing further until the red taillights in front tell them they’ve arrived.

“Just the basics,” Dean advises. “One duffel, one weapon, one bedroll. Any more than that and Dad will have a shit fit.”

“And we wouldn’t want that,” Ty snarks with a roll of his eyes.

He shuts up when he sees the look of pure terror Dean’s fixing on him. 

~~~

The mood lightens somewhat over a breakfast of iron rations, in this case beef jerky and soup from a can. Dean and his father swap stories. Dean’s demeanor brightening under his father’s attention. John gradually becoming less gruff, though every tale Dean tells is peppered with advice from his old man. That he should have disguised his smell with dog’s blood before venturing into the vamp’s nest, that he’s too dependent on the Colt .45, down to the brand of fucking salt he should have bought. Ty’s new to this, but he’s pretty sure that sodium chloride is sodium chloride, whatever color the bag is.

Talk shifts to ghost stories, and Ty perks up. Since Dean first started teaching him the ways, he’s been kicking around an idea. “Crazy thought,” he interrupts, raising a hand.

Both Winchesters look at him like they’ve completely forgotten he was even there. 

“Dean was saying how the hardest part of ghost hunting is the lack of defensive weapons.”

“No, I said it was a lack of firepower. If you have anything iron-”

Ty silences him with one finger in the air. “Fair enough. Iron and salt, those are your options, right?”

“Yes,” Dean replies with a look that asks what the hell he’s doing.

Ignoring him, Ty plunges on. “And iron bullets aren’t practical.”

“Well theoretically, you could-” John begins, but Ty continues over him.

“They’re not practical, because casting them would take time and they’d be wasted more often than not. Not to mention, how they’d stand out to a modern CSI team. Cleaning up a scene of all those rounds? Pain in the ass.”

Even John’s nodding at that.

“But _salt_. Rock salt. Fill a double-aught shell, like you would with buckshot. At close range, the energy loss should be minimal, and whatever spread you get from the shot will only be amplified by the sawed-off. Maximum hit damage.”

Ty looks from the one to the other. John seems to be considering the idea, checking it over for flaws. Dean clearly has no idea that he is beaming. Ty shoots him a small smile, part appreciation, part warning of the very real danger his face betrays.

Both boys hold their tongues in deference to John. At last he says only, “Yeah, I guess.” 

“Really, Dad, you think it could work?” Ty could live on the hope in Dean’s voice.

“Maybe. It’s not a bad idea. Don’t waste the shells we have, but you can buy more next time and we’ll see.” He stands, stretches, scratches his head. “Hey, Dean, drive me out to check the news.”

Dean reaches for his keys and is halfway to the door before he calls out, “Come on, Ty, wait’ll you see the fish-wrappers Dad calls ‘the papers.’”

“No, Dean, I think it’s better if we go alone. Ty can stay here and work on sharpening the knives from my truck.” 

His son’s face falls a moment, but then Dean shrugs, pops his collar up to his ears, and tosses his friend an apologetic look, half a cheerless smile and a raised eyebrow. _Who’m I to argue?_ it says.

The door has not closed behind them and Ty can hear John muttering, “You did show him how to sharpen knives, right, son?”

“Dad, he’s a game hunter…”

~~~

Dean had been tense enough when he came back from the errand with his father. Which took considerably longer than it needed to. And had evidently involved a trip to the barber’s shop for a proper soldier’s haircut. Ty had tried to make a joke, something along the lines of, “Did you have to go to a different store for each rag?” Even with John puttering outside, checking Ty’s handiwork, the angle of Dean’s shoulders and his jaw had frustrated Ty. He’d pestered Dean for details that the older boy would never share, until Dean had finally exploded. “Fuck, Ty, just fucking drop it, okay? I’m not in the fucking mood,” and skulked outside.

After another week in close proximity with both John and Ty, including a salt-and-burn and a werewolf-that-wasn’t, Dean is absolutely wrecked. John doesn’t seem to notice. He doesn’t realize that Dean isn’t eating. He doesn’t hear his son grinding his teeth in his sleep. Somehow, he can’t see the cruel mask that Dean slipped on somewhere between the hospital and the falling-down foreclosure, the mask that lets him follow his father blindly into battle, lets him murder in cold blood on an assumption of lycanthropy. And if Ty’s disgusted by Dean’s actions, what self-loathing is he hiding behind the smarmy wisecracks and the obnoxious bravado that forces him to leer at every skirt and rack within a hundred miles? 

This is so much worse than the time he threatened to take Ty to a strip club.

When Dean Winchester breaks, he breaks like an atomic test. They’re researching the next case, an open bottle of whiskey between them. This time, it’s omens in some cowtown to the north: electrical malfunctions, freak storms, livestock turned inside out, columns of smoke that don’t follow the wind. John’s convinced it’s something called a Yellow Eyes.

“What’s that?” Ty asks. “How do we kill it?”

Neither Winchester makes any attempt at an answer, glaring angrily at nothing in particular.

He tries again. “Dean, is it a-”

“It’s nothing,” but he’s holding back a flood at this point.

“Dean?”

“Shut up!” He jumps out of his chair forcefully enough to knock it backwards. “Shut up! Just shut up for once in your fucking life!”

Ty wants to get angry. He balls his fists. He wants to lash out. Instead, he closes his eyes. Takes a deep breath. Straightens his back and shoulders. Opens his eyes and stares until he catches Dean’s gaze. “Dean Winchester, you will take that the fuck back, right fucking now.”

Ty has never before seen six feet something of solid muscle crumple to the ground. Frankly, the sight horrifies him. He doesn’t think, just rushes immediately to Dean’s side. “Dean!”

“Get off him,” John huffs. “He’s not dead, just weak.”

And he almost has a chance to start a new thought before Ty crams a fist into John’s jaw. “You will take that back, too,” Ty growls into the shocked, furious face before him. 

John replies with a sharp right that grazes Ty’s ear as he sidesteps. 

Ty’s at a serious disadvantage against the older man, outweighed by fifty pounds, too short, inexperienced at hand-to-hand combat. He’s also left-handed. But Ty has the advantage of youth, grace, lithe strength. He dodges John’s heavy-handed blows easily, landing a few solid body shots. But John’s advancing on him, and Ty’s running out of floor space. Back to the wall, he attempts to duck, maneuver his body under John’s arm and away. He doesn’t count on the older man grabbing for his throat, lifting him, pinning against the wall with his forearm. _Jesus Christ, he’s going to choke me out right here._ “Dean!” Ty squeaks. His eyes are failing, going dark and splotchy. “John, stop.”

“You think you can come into my family and threaten us? I don’t know who the hell you are, but I will not hesitate to snap you right now, you little fucking-”

“Put him down!” Dean roars. Ty gets a faint glimpse of Dean, shoulders straight, wicked grin, before his vision sparks and he feels like he’s falling. 

Next thing he knows, Dean is tugging at his upper arm. Dragging him from the floor. “Come on, we gotta go. Come on Ty, wake up, we gotta go.” Ty grunts something incoherent, lets Dean pull him upright. There’s a shaggy mound in the middle of the room. They’re out the door before it fully registers that the mound is John. “Dean?”

“Shh, come on, just go. Lean on me. Stuff’s in the car.”

Dean shoves Ty through the driver’s door and slides in behind. “Seat belt,” he urges, cranking the ignition and peeling out. Blurrily, Ty thinks about mentioning that “bat out of hell doesn’t begin to describe your driving,” but he must have said something, because an almost-smile of relief appears on Dean’s face. 

“Put your seat belt on, babe,” he chides calmly.

“You’re not the boss of me,” Ty slurs as he shimmies his head onto Dean’s leg. “Are you okay, Dean?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re lying.”

“Not really.”

“What happened back there?”

He hesitates. “Nothing.” 

Ty twists his head to stare up at Dean. “Now you’re lying.”

Dean’s lips twitch into a crooked grin. “Yeah, maybe. He hit me, I hit him, who knows. There was hitting. One of us is unconscious and the other is running away like a fucking coward.”

“You’re not a coward. You stood up for me.”

“He’d have killed you.”

Ty purses his lips. “Yeah, maybe.”

Dean scratches Ty’s head with his free hand. Pets his hair from forehead to crown. “He called you a faggot. Not me, but I know he wonders. I probably wouldn’t have beaten the shit out of him if he hadn’t said anything.”

“I’ve been waiting for him to call me a nigger this whole time, so-”

Dean shakes his head forcefully. “Nah, I don’t think he would have. But the other one, it’s been on the tip of his tongue since he found us.”

“Shit.”

“Hell, he’s been wondering about me, god, half my life.” Dean’s silent for a couple of miles. “No one ever told me it was wrong to be queer; it’s just that no one ever said it was okay.” 

Ty nods softly. “I hear that.” 

“Dad must’ve guessed there was something not-quite-straight about me. The day he caught me in tight pants and a skinny tie, singing in the mirror, he tossed my Bowie collection.”

“The hell he did.”

Dean frowns and shrugs. “That same week, I stole gloves from a lost and found. ‘Can’t shoot with frozen fingers,’ I told him. But all he could say was, ‘Purple? There weren’t any men’s gloves?’” A cocky smirk. “‘Nope!’ I lied.” Ty smiles back. “Next day, I found gray gloves in my duffel, and purple ones in the trash.”

“Asshole.” 

He nods. “Yup. But I stole them back. They’re still here, in the Impala. Somewhere. The most defiant act of my childhood.”

“Pretty sad if that’s the most defiant thing you ever did.”

“Like hell it is. Not the most defiant _ever_.”

“What did you do that was more-”

“Are you kidding me? I just beat the shit out of him! Left him! Do you have any idea how _wrong_ this feels? I’m responsible for him! I took care of him and my brother every goddamn day, since I was a fucking kid! And now I-” He takes a breath, but it’s really half a sob, “I just left him.” 

Ty lets him wallow for a moment, only a moment, before replying. “Dean? Listen to me, please.”

He grunts.

“You left him because he is bad for you.”

Dean whips his head down to face Ty, pushing furious.

“No, listen,” Ty continues. “He’s bad for _you_ , and he’s worse for me. Because one of these days, he was gonna figure us out. And he was ... not going to take it well. And maybe today was that day.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Dean huffs in a rush of breath. He chuckles, a small gallows laugh. “But let’s not play the my-father’s-shittier-than-yours game, okay? Your father shot you. Actually shot a bullet through you! Mine just tried to strangle my boyfriend.” 

“Boyfriend?”

Dean thinks a minute. Smirks. 

Ty spends the next fifty miles blissfully reveling in head scritches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I took the credit for the salt rounds away from John and gave it to my OC, which is pretty damn self-indulgent, but I like Ty better than John... Also, I did actual research on this and wanted an excuse to use it.


	9. Hot and Cold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I'm tired of lying and cheating and stealing and hustling pool and eating shitty diner food. I'm 26 years old, man. I'm tired of it. I should have been out of the revenge business a long time ago, but damn it's hard to quit it."
> 
> "Have you ever considered piracy?" Ty smirks.

A hundred thousand miles of road behind them, and they begin to hope for something more than sketchy motels and monster blood caked under their dirty fingernails.

Leaving John had broken something in Dean. Something that needed breaking, but it was painful nonetheless. They'd drifted for a while, he and Ty. Drifted apart, drifted together. Ty had been a poor substitute for the legitimate mental health care Dean so clearly needed after his shit childhood, but Ty's presence, his commitment to stay, did wonders for Dean. There was never any escape from the job: that was a given. Still, to have someone to brush the road dust off of at the end of the night, someone new to the life who maybe needed a little more after-care when the baddies got too frisky, yeah, Dean had needed that. Ty had never failed to be an object for Dean's compassion, and he wasn't afraid to push back at Dean, give him the business when he needed a dressing-down.

Maybe that's why, when they find themselves choosing between the third nest of vamps in frozen Wisconsin in a month or a "ghost" that may or may not be haunting a B&B in Key West, Dean doesn't even question the fishy story Ty's feeding him. Ty is determined to give Dean the first honest-to-god vacation of his adult life. A break from the crazies and the beasties. And even he's astonished that it works. That Dean is letting him drag him into normalcy.

"You really don't mind?" Ty asks for the twentieth time since Sheboygan.

Dean laughs. "It's fine. I- I want this."

"Really?"

"Yes, now shut up or so help me I'll turn this car around, and you can freeze your fingers off decapitating leeches by yourself!" He turns a warm smile on Ty. A few miles pass in silence, then: "I want out."

Ty's puzzled. "What? What do you mean?"

"Of the life."

"Oh." Ty's eyebrows shoot up, but he can't think of anything better to say. "Yeah, take this job and shove it" can backfire just as easily as "No way Jose, we have work to do." He waits for Dean to continue.

Or maybe Dean is waiting for Ty to say something more. They're almost to the state line before Dean picks up the thread. "I'm tired of lying and cheating and stealing and hustling pool and eating shitty diner food. I'm 26 years old, man. I'm tired of it. I should have been out of the revenge business a long time ago, but damn it's hard to quit it."

"Have you ever considered piracy?" Ty smirks.

"Do I look like the Dread Pirate Roberts to you?"

"Depends, let me see you in a blindfold."

"Fuck you, it's a mask, thank you very much. And maybe later." He smiles his crooked, flirty grin. "Where was I?"

"Under a blindfold, and you're tied to the-"

"God Jesus fuck, babe," he whines, his fingers tight on the wheel. "I'm trying to have a serious conversation."

"I think my plans to get you under me are pretty damn serious, too!"

Dean rolls his eyes. "Okay, let me get this thought out, and then you can sext me all you want."

"Pretty sure sexting is phone sex with pictures."

"Well that'd be okay, too, just shut the hell up for a minute."

Ty laughs. "Okay, bossy britches, no need to get your panties in a twist. What's your big important point? I mean, aside from the obvious."

"Haha, thanks. No, my point is, I am too old for this shit, and I'm done hunting, and I want a normal life. With you, preferably."

"Are you- Dean, are you proposing?"

"No," he says too quickly. "No, just that… Well, why can't we be fucking normal, you know? Why does everyone else get an apple-pie life, and we have to scrape ectoplasm off our skin before we can go to sleep at night?"

Ty hesitates before replying. Slowly, cautiously, he says, "That is the most selfish thing I've ever heard you say. And I think you're absolutely right to say so."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

Dean lets out a breath he's been holding for the last twenty-two years.

~~~

Less than twenty-four hours later, they've torn up more than the 1600 miles of road. They're tearing themselves out of the life. They're ripping at the very fabric of their world. And as they tear up the back staircase to their room at the Conch-Out bed and breakfast on Union Street, it feels pretty damn right.

~~~

Sometime around eleven, when most of the guests are out partying, Dean slips into a pair of plaid pajama pants and his Master of Puppets tee before venturing out for the first watch. He prowls the upper floors on silent feet, listening for anything unusual. Aside from a few bitten pillows, all's quiet on the western front. No one is moving around at this time of night; no one to wonder about the kid in the corridors. On his way down to the common room, he encounters the first signs of life, a couple in their 30s, rushing up the stairs and giggling like a couple of teenagers. Dean can tell from the waft as they go past that both women are drunk as skunks. He chuckles and tips them a salute as he saunters on. 

The common room is warm and bright and still rather lively. Mostly folks (mostly tourists) waiting for their friends before heading out for a balmy night of judgment-free revelry. There's the owners and a straight-looking couple from central Florida, but everyone else is from someplace else. And even the owners have only been in town for a couple of years; they only know what the realtor and the former owners told them, a romanticized ghost story about a jilted lover. Seems that a local dive boat captain and a girl on vacation had a thing that turned into the other girl staying on a more permanent basis, until the captain disappeared for a week and resurfaced the day after Fantasy Fest with a different girl on vacation, and the first girl murdered her lover *in this very house* *cue spooky fingers* 

Dean is not amused.

But the stories of flickering lights and cold spots raise suspicions that there's truth to the tale. He presses for more information and discovers that the captain's boat was the Queen Anne's Revenge (of course it was) and that she was something of a local celebrity by the name of Anne Baylor.

Back in the room, Dean lets the laptop boot up while he wakes Ty for the changing of the guard. Fortunately, the laptop is ridiculously slow. 

Ty can’t find anything compelling on Captain Baylor on the web, beyond the story Dean’s already heard. He does, however, find an official historic record of the house, as well as a profile done for a now-defunct tourist zine from almost twenty years ago. Of all the sources Dean has ever trusted, fanzines should be the lowest and yet usually rank highest. A person willing to commit personal time and money on a news story is a person who believes in said news story. Of course the pseudonym on page one, “Walter Conchwrite,” pretty well guarantees that there will be no follow-up interview. 

“That sucks. What’s it telling us?”

“The info looks pretty helpful, actually. According to this, the only signs of paranormal activity ever witnessed in the house have taken place at 4:03am. But every morning. No strange deaths before or since the phenomenon began.”

“Which was?”

Ty scrolls back to the top of the text. “It doesn’t say. Forever?”

“How old is the house?”

“It’s one of those that was floated in from Cuba.”

“Damn. So this could just be a resident spirit? Trapped by god-knows-what trinket hidden in the floorboards or the walls.”

Ty nods. “Seems like it. Harmless enough, too; worst that ever happens is a flickering light and a cold spot, both on the back stoop.” He checks the time. “Fireworks in 10; you wanna come?”

“Yup. I’m taking an iron, though. Just in case.”

“I’ll grab the salt. Let me just get my pants on.”

~~~

Like clockwork. The porch light wanes, wavers just on the cusp of going out entirely. The temperature plummets ten degrees where Ty is standing. Dean can see the plume of breath falling from Ty’s lips, but Dean can’t feel a thing. 

“You feeling something?”

“Yeah, it’s fucking cold, genius.”

And just that fast, the light blazes forth again and Ty sighs as warm humidity blankets him once again. “Much better. That was weird.”

“Like you said, though, harmless. I don’t know, man, maybe we should try putting it to rest?”

“I can’t imagine how we would.”

Dean crouches down at Ty’s feet, searching the floor for any sort of clue. “Maybe there is something under the floorboard. Check this out,” and he runs a finger around a single linoleum square, just slightly curled on all sides. Not loose, exactly, but frayed, maybe. “The others are all perfectly flat, but this one…” He trails off as he tries to shimmy a thick nail under the tile. 

“Allow me,” Ty waves him away. “This is a job for svelte model fingers. Your little sausage fingers will only-”

“Hey! I do not have-”

“Sweetie, you do. I love your sausage fingers,” he adds, sweeping his knuckles to his mouth for a quick kiss, “but this,” gesturing at the floor, “is man’s work, so scootch,” dismissing Dean with a waggle of fingers and a playful grin. 

“Fine,” only mostly pretending to be hurt, “I’m gonna check under the porch.” He snatches the Maglite from his pocket and heads down the short flight of steps.

“Dork,” Ty chuckles. 

“I heard that.”

“I know you did.”

After several fruitless minutes, Dean emerges from the shadows. “Hey, you know what? The EMF is silent.”

Ty listens for the hum. “You’re right. But I’m sure it beeped when the light flickered.”

“Right. It’s not here.”

“So what, it does its thing and then it disappears?”

Dean shrugs, “Sure seems that way.”

The silence grows longer as they contemplate their next move.

“I wonder…”

“What do you wonder, Dean?”

He climbs the porch, assessing the lean-to area where the cold spot formed. “Could we, huh. Could we trap a ghost _in_ a salt circle?”

Ty considers it. “I mean, I guess we could, maybe. But why?”

“I dunno. See if it wants to be set free? Maybe it could tell us how.”

“You want to trap a ghost, just to ask it if we should spring it?”

Dean looks down at the ground, scrubs at the back of his neck. “Yeah, that’s, never mind.”

Ty shakes his head. “No, it’s a good idea, really. I just, I think it’s harmless. I doubt anyone will ever invest as much energy into the thing as we did tonight.”

“You think we should leave it alone? It’s gonna go vengeful, and-” 

“It seem vengeful to you?”

Dean blinks. “No. No, it seemed, uh.”

“It seemed at home.”

“Yeah.” Dean nods. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

Ty takes Dean’s hands in his. “If you want to stop hunting, and I think you should (I think we both should), if you want to stop hunting, you should just stop.” He smiles, and Dean smiles back. “Take this little ghost as a bookend. As the last stop. Whatever metaphor you wanna use,” he adds. “This is as much of a sign as the universe is ever gonna give us. We can walk away.”

Dean laughs. He laughs with his mouth and his voice, with his eyes and his cheeks, with his lips as he presses them to Ty’s. “Yes,” he murmurs, a grin splitting his face. “We can walk away.”


	10. Going Back to the Start

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You have the memory of a goldfish, because you have asked for key lime pie at every restaurant for the past five meals. Including breakfast this morning.”   
> “I’ll have you know,” he scoffs, “that I have a memory like a steel trap."

_“Your fur is red / So beautiful / Like an angel in disguise” - Ylvis, “What Does the Fox Say”_

 

“Hey look, they have key lime pie! We should get some.”

Ty glares at Dean. “You’re hilarious.”

“What?”

“That joke’s getting old,” but Ty laughs anyway.

Dean frowns. “I’m not joking, I’m serious.”

“Then you have the memory of a goldfish, because you have said those exact words at every restaurant for the past five meals. Including breakfast this morning.” 

“I’ll have you know,” he scoffs, “that I have a memory like a steel trap. Come on, ask me anything.”

Ty retorts, “Okay, who was your third-grade teacher?”

“Hang on, that’s actually a tough one. I had six, uh no, five that year.” He counts on his fingers. “Miss Jenkins, Ms Smith, Ms Pittard, uh, shit, oh Wyoming, that was Mrs… Frank! And Mr Collins, of course. He was my first guy crush.”

“In third grade?”

“Yeah. Why? Is that early?”

“No. But your teacher?”

Dean grins. “Shut up. I had a crush on my kindergarten teacher, too!” He shakes his head, mockingly wistful. “Ah, Miss Paige!”

“Now you’re just showing off,” Ty says, reaching over to smooth down the collar of Dean's red shirt. “I don’t understand how you can be wearing a t-shirt _and_ a dress shirt _and_ a jacket. And a black one at that. Aren’t you dying?”

“I like lots of layers. Never know when you might get stranded somewhere and wish you had more.”

Ty pops an eyebrow. “Dude. We’re in the Keys. It’s 72, literally the perfect temperature. You’re ridiculous.”

“Okay Mr. Shiny-shirt-club-wear, you tell me all about looking ridiculous.”

“Look, if you don’t want to go dancing, that’s fine, just-”

Dean shushes Ty with a peck on the lips. “You know how I feel about it,” he murmurs, “but _you_ want to go and _I_ want to go with you.”

Ty smiles.

~~~

“This isn’t so bad, is it?” Ty sighs.

The truth is, there’s nowhere Dean would rather be than here. The club is crowded, sweltering (he is so finding a place to stash this jacket), and the shitty house music is way too loud. Even the drink specials, some giant fruity concoction in a hurricane glass, are hideously expensive, so of course Ty’s had three of them; meanwhile, Dean’s been nursing a bottle of domestic for the last hour because it's the cheapest thing they have. But now, slow-dancing to a boy-band remix in a quiet-ish corner with Ty, who’s just north of drunk and crooning in his ear, Dean feels whole. 

“… Your soul is like a secret that I never could keep…”

“Hey Ty?”

“Yeah babe?” he asks, a little dreamily.

“I’m proposing.”

Ty pulls his cheek away from Dean’s and goggles at him. “You fucking serious?”

“Yeah, I’m fucking serious,” but he can’t help laughing at the surprise on Ty’s face. “Marry me?”

Ty laughs, too. “Well, not here!”

“I mean, we’d have to go to Massachusetts or something. But? Will you?”

“Oh my baby, don’t look so terrified! Of course I will,” and kisses the worry right off Dean’s face. Ty wraps his arms awkwardly around Dean’s neck and, pulling his ear in close to his lips, he confesses, “If you didn’t ask, I was gonna.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Dean’s eyes drop closed and he smiles, pressed close to Ty. To his fiancé. Weird. That’s gonna take some getting used to.

The song hasn’t ended, yet there’s a tap on his shoulder and a brash “Can I cut in?” Dean’s head snaps up, eyes blazing. “Look, buddy, find another-”

But the short guy with the porn mustache snatches Ty around the middle and yanks him out of Dean’s arms. 

“Hey dude, lay off,” Ty complains. Even towering over the man and outweighing him by at least fifty pounds, there’s a look of fear on Ty’s face. The guy is stronger than he looks. “Dean!”

“Hey, take your hands off him, pal!” 

“No can do, I’ve got-” 

Dean clocks him. Dean falls to the floor screaming as every bone in his hand shatters. 

The whatever-it-is loosens his grip on Ty just for a moment, reaching out to wave a lazy hand over Dean’s. 

“Son of a bitch,” Dean wonders as the pain suddenly quells. He flinches at the unpleasant sensation of bones healing at time-lapse speed. “Dude, what the fuck?” 

“Be right back, Pumpkin; just have to take this cute widdle prodigal son home, and then I’ll explain everything.” 

Dean blinks, and they’re gone with a whoosh. Vanished. Nothing but empty space where a second before had stood Ty and the mysterious brick-wall. Dean blinks again, and the guy’s back, alone, and talking a mile a minute. 

“So like I was saying, I can explain everything. Does it seem a little loud in here to you? Let’s see if we can’t find a better place to chat.” He taps Dean’s shoulder and in the space of another blink, they’re standing next to the Impala. Before Dean can process what’s happened, before he can summon language filthy enough to convey his confusion, the short guy has resumed monologing. “Ty’s home, safe and sound. Now, now; there’s no reason to get all bent out of shape. Seems Mom and Dad had a change of heart when his little bro came out as bi last year. They’re just happy knowing Ty’s alive; isn’t that sweet. Oh, and you’ll be gratified to know that he declined the memory wipe I offered him. Even knowing that you won’t remember him, he’s sentimental. Says he wants to cherish you. Or whatever.” Dean’s face is red and furious, and he’s seconds from formulating actual words. “Which brings us to my real business. So listen up, angelbait: My brothers seem to think you’re pretty hot shit. And I can’t say I blame them. But I have my own life and I can’t just follow you around, saving your skin every time you get a little verklempt.”

Dean’s getting angrier and angrier. “What the hell are you?” he snaps.

“Not Hell; the other one. Fluffy clouds, harps, halos.”

Dean scowls. “You’re saying you’re an angel?” 

“Archangel, actually, Princess. I’m the one they call Gabriel.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“You wanna punch me again and find out?”

He had been thinking about it. Instead, he asks, “What do you want with Ty?”

“With him? Nothing. It’s you they want.” 

“Who’s ‘they?’”

“My brothers,” he repeats. “They have an interest in keeping you safe. For now. Since I’m the loudmouth of the group, they keep pulling me out of retirement, compelling me to do all the crap ‘talk to the humans’ gigs.” He consoles himself with a handful of M&Ms, conjured out of thin air.

“Please god, quit your bitching and tell me what you want.”

“First of all, not God; that’s my dad.”

“Of course it is,” rolling his eyes.

“Two, like I said, it’s my brothers who give a rat’s ass about you.”

Dean frowns. “And just who are these brothers of yours?”

“The other archangels. They’re throwing a little apocalypse, and they need you there. Well, not you so much as your banging bod, Romeo.”

“Uh-huh. Why me?”

Gabriel shrugs. “I dunno. Not my party, not my problem. Anyways, we can’t just have you driving your car off a bridge just because little bro and daddy run away.”

Dean looks genuinely confused. “What? Are you talking about Sam going to Stanford? Dude, that was years ago. A lot’s changed. Yeah, I had a moment of weakness in the parking lot, but I never-”

“Three times.”

“Huh?”

“Three times you tried to off yourself that night.”

“No.”

“Yes.” Gabriel drops the façade and stares Dean down. “Yes, you did. Including the time you steered this hulk through a guardrail and into a river. I had to fish you and your worthless abomination out of the water before you drowned. Three times I warned you not to do it again. Three times I wiped your memory. But the third time, I said no more. I said, ‘Fuck it, if he’s so eager to die, let’s find him something worth living for.’ First coping strategy on your list: alcohol. Second coping strategy: sex.” Gabriel shrugs and smiles mirthlessly. “Arranging the conditions for optimal Dean-survivability was far too easy. Almost as easy as you, Deano.”

Dean looks away, disgusted.

“Buddy, I stocked that bar with every type of hoochie mama I could imagine, and my ability to imagine hoochie mamas runs _pretty_ deep. But no, leave it to Dean to gravitate towards the window dressing. I was ready to lay bets on you and the bartender! But Ty,” he whistles. “I couldn’t have picked a better punishment if I’d tried. A skinny underage kid, and you can’t touch him. Wow. That just,” he bursts out laughing, “that explains so much!”

Fists clenched at his sides, Dean’s too busy fuming to ask the so-called archangel what he means.

“No? Not even curious? Well, I’ll tell you: I snuck a peek at my little bro’s timeline, and a funny thing pops up ’long about the time you stroll your happy ass out of Hell.”

Dean’s head snaps up. “Time I do what now?”

“I don’t know what you two get up to behind the Gates of Hell, but baby Castiel is never the same after he pulls you from perdition.”

Dean is beyond confused by this creature's babble. “Dude, I don’t even know what you’re talking about, man. A Hell’s Angel called Cas-?”

“You tell me, angelbait; it’s your future, not mine.”

“This is ridiculous," he shouts. He rounds on Gabriel, jabbing a finger at him furiously. "You bring Ty back here right now, or I swear to god, I’ll-”

“Whoa whoa, invoking Dad again?” He holds his hands out for peace. “I get it, I get it, this is a lot to take in. You should have heard the blasphemy spilling from Mary’s mouth when I told her about Jesus. And that was before the actual conception, right? Wink wink, huh?” Dean isn’t engaging, and Gabriel’s laugh fades to a sneer. “Yeah well, nothing like watching old Dad come over the virgin. I’m still scarred.” 

Dean throws his hands in the air in exasperation. “This is- I don’t know what this is-”

“Listen, Princess,” Gabriel interrupts, gesturing palms up in mock worship, “you’re getting divine revelations here, and you don’t seem the least impressed. Frankly, I’m insulted,” but he doesn’t sound it. He sighs, like he’s making up his mind. “Look, I don’t have time to perch on your shoulder; that’s why I gave you Ty, to keep your mind off your troubles for a bit. Keep you in the game. Can’t have a decent chess match if the queen keeps blowing her brains out.” 

“But Ty-”

Gabriel is beyond exasperated by how long it’s taking for this fuckwit to cotton on. “What about him?”

“You’re saying I’m going to forget him? Just poof, gone?”

“Pretty much, pretty boy.”

“Won’t I notice that I have a four-year gap in my memory?”

“You’d think, yeah, but human memories- well, if you need to access a memory and can’t remember the details, you’ll make it up.”

“But why erase him at all?”

Gabriel sighs, rolls his eyes, but not, Dean observes, at him. Like this is a big cosmic inside joke and Dean’s not in the loop. “Because our daddies need blunt instruments. Because you’re too good a person with Ty in your life. Because suddenly you’re healthy and well-adjusted. You’re soft,” he says, dropping the act again. He talks to Dean like maybe he’s talking to himself, trying to figure out his own universe even as he destroys Dean’s. “Your daddy needs the old Dean, the barbarian who never hesitated to drop anything that isn’t human.” Dean thinks back to the girl, the demon vessel- what was her name? Melissa. He thinks of Melissa, of her mother, of how he abandoned them both. “And mine needs the guy who would sell his soul in a heartbeat if it would restore his baby brother.” 

Dean considers that. It’s been so long since Sammy was his world. Ty is, of course, no substitute, but being able to lavish his affection on Ty, he’s largely forgotten to worry about Sam. That scares him. “Sammy. Jesus, it’s been two years,” he mutters. “What will it be like to see Sammy again?”

“Very much the same as when he left. Maybe you'll be a little less clingy, because let’s be honest, Winchester, you get a little scary when you’re clingy." Gabriel pauses. "I’m gonna make this easy for you. You won’t rest easy until you’ve got your brother Sam back, so why don’t we just fast-forward a bit? You’ll be going looking for him in a couple of days, and I can literally think of a billion better things to do with my time between now and then, at least half of which involve scantily-clad females. So let’s skip ahead to the day you arrive at Stanford to push your brother back into this old rattletrap, and you stop being my fucking problem, okay, big boy?”

“You expect me to just forget about Ty and move on with my life, just because an angel-”

“Archangel.”

“-tells me I should?”

“Actually Deano, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” Dean freezes as the archangel Gabriel brings two fingers to his forehead.

~~~

He woke up suddenly to a flash of light. For half of a half of a second, he thought that he’d fallen asleep at the wheel, that the headlights ahead would plow full-bore right into the Impala’s gleaming chrome grille, but then he remembered: he was exhausted after the long drive and let himself pass out for a couple of minutes after parking outside Sammy’s dorm. Sammy! It’d been way too long, and yet it also seemed like just yesterday, that Sammy had announced he was leaving, abandoning Dean, coming here. Sure, a small part of Dean thought that it would have been nice to let him stay here, finish out his degrees, get married (did he have a girlfriend? Dean couldn’t quite remember), and settle down, far far from the life, far far from pain and deprivation. Dean sighed. No rest for the wicked, as they said, they who’d never seen real wickedness. Sam had gotten his reprieve, and this was more important than grades and diplomas. Duty called: Dad was on a hunting trip, and he hadn’t been home in a few days.


End file.
